The tomb's emptiness

Haiku without limits

The tomb’s emptiness,

underlined by an earthquake.

Still confounding us.

Two faithful women,

don’t need spices as a prop,

visiting the tomb.

Its all a bit much!

An angel is sent to clear

away confusion.

The stone has been rolled

and the guards have all fainted.

Do not be afraid!

Instructions follow.

Come and see, then go and tell:

Your Lord has been raised!

Fear mixes with joy,

strangeness and uncertainty.

What are we to think?

Suddenly he’s here.

Do not fear! Go, tell my friends

We will meet again.

© Ken Rookes 2020

Let us plant dates

What is hope? It is the pre-sentiment that imagination is more real, and reality less real than it looks. It is the suspicion that the overwhelming brutality of facts that oppress us and repress us is not the last word. It is the hunch that reality is more complex than the realists want us to believe. That the frontiers of the possible are not determined by the limits of the actual. And that in a miraculous and unexpected way, life is preparing the creative events which will open the way to freedom and to resurrection. But, the two, suffering and hope, must live from each other. Suffering without hope produces resentment and despair. But hope without suffering creates illusions, naivete, and drunkenness. So let us plant dates, even though we who plant them will never eat them. We must live by the love of what we will never see. This is the secret of discipline. It is a refusal to let our creative act be dissolved away by our own need for immediate sense experience. And it's a stubborn commitment to the future of our grandchildren. Such disciplined love is what has given saints, revolutionaries, and martyrs the courage to die for the future they envisage. They make their own bodies the seed of their own highest hopes.”

Ruben Alvez b. 1933
Tomorrow's Child

http://www.edgeofenclosure.org/proper28b.html