Easter 2008

Easter. I approach the years' empty tomb.
What has time done with itself?
Is the news worth the communicating?
The word's loincloth can remember little.
A thin, cold wind blows from beyond the abysm
that I gawk into.
But supposing there were bones; the darkness
illuminated like a museum?
In glass cases I have peered at the brittle bundles,
exonerating my conscience with mortality's tears.
But here, true to my name, I have nothing to hold on
to, an absence so much richer than a presence,
offering instead of the skull's leer an impaled possibility
for faith's fingertips to explore

 - R.S. Thomas