Easter, Earthed

Dust you are; to dust you shall return,

For you are earthen: clay and roughened loam,

A mold of craze-cracked bowls and poorer soil,

A human humus, rich only with that rot

Which roots the sod of Eden’s fateful tree.

Yet in this season God Himself is thrown

And glazed and fired—fallowed, furrowed deep.

He dons the fractured humane vessel’s form—

A harrowed field, wound painfully with thorns,

Torn ground that groans under a cross-like tree—

And shatters, breaks itself, a bowl that spills

A price of blood, like wine on clattered shards.

Still limn these shards with living gold; the bowl

Now bears its breaking-lines, yet gleams as whole

And heals all others. Dying dust with Him

Will flower as a verdant-tended field,

To cup and cultivate that growth of God

In human earth that lifts the tree of life. 

Note from the author: In this poem, I draw on the imagery of kintsugi, a Japanese technique for repairing broken pottery by filling in the cracks with gold, making the finished product far more beautiful and valuable than the original piece. This image of broken pottery (made from fired clay) resonated for me with the idea of “earthiness,” which in turn suggested a variety of additional metaphors involving earth in fields and agriculture.