We’ve been packing up our house for quite a while. Now we are at the last moment before the move this week. So that was disorienting enough!
Then Covid-19 stole the best together-times of the year: the sunrise meeting for Resurrection Sunday and the parties afterward. Gwen and I usually have a party. I was sad enough about moving and missing things until family and friends started telling us how much they were missing things with me! So on the most joyous day of the year, I was sad, too.
Angie sent over a video that made me cry for joy and tear up for sadness because a flash mob was praising God in the mall but we can’t do that together right now.
So that’s how it is this year. The lockdown finally got to me on Easter. But it feels kind of fresh, too. On Good Friday, I wrote the poem that follows. I thought I’d put it out there again, now that I know even better how we all have a bittersweet taste in our mouths: sweet from Easter candy and bitter from Easter coronavirus. Things may never be the same for us this year, because of joy or because of sadness, but Jesus will be our joy and ever with us in our sadness.
On Friday, my thoughts turned to the terror and ecstasy of birth. I’ve got a feeling we are all being cleansed in a way by this strange, communal experience of “social distancing” and the threat of catching the virus. I know I feel like something new is being born. It made me think of another notable birth I experienced.
My wife was as big as a barn.
Her water broke with a flood
and the twins rode the river.
The birthing room was a bedlam:
our household peeking in,
a class walking through gaping.
Crazy, wondrous — jolt after jolt.
The first twin came out blue,
The next surfed out, tubing it.
Grief — surrounded on the table.
Joy — held by a slimy ankle.
I was suspended between.
The blue baby pinked up enough,
the flying one tucked up next.
And the birth-threatened love lived.
All was well again.
Awake at 3, the night bird sang;
I’m awake to listen.
And then the siren sounded.
The song of love met the tragic:
a tulip pushes up,
a loved one moves through the veil.
Our grief is budding out this year
like an unknown blossom
in a dystopic garden.
Our birthing room is a bedlam:
Peeking, pushing, pinking.
We are suspended between.
All will be well again.