Raised

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I am the resurrection and the life - John 11:25


----------------/The Thoughts of Lazarus Raised

When I was sick, acute pain of the liver, I fancied myself a ghost
I’d close my eyes and just walk around Bethany,
meandering even lingering at the places I held most dear.
I suspected I would never see those places again.
The temple, the market, the dirt roads facing North
on which I and comrades of my youth mused, secretly,
led to the Roman coliseum where we’d be gladiators,
conquerors of Caesar’s occupation,
thickening stench on all the land, only we Jews could smell.
“Lazarus beheaded a centurion:” so we wished
oblivious to the centurion of fallen humanity, my head currently in his lap,
draggled, sword drawn, bright beaming tip of finality
dazzling as it refracts light from the sun.
When I came to in bed, I would scan the walls
rotting wood that my lampstand matured into over the years,
this totem of human frailty, the burlap bags for the surplus harvest
slung in the shadowy corner of the room beneath the windowsill.
The gentle wind on my pained chest like angels’ breathing.

Everything’s different now. The sentimentality for ghosts -all gone,
displaced by precious predilections for savoring the present,
the incessant kissing from Mary and Martha,
the tears on Jesus’ face, bemused expressions on crowds
who flanked my tomb to give death a final salute for me,
like an embrace of Time from which I cant disengage. 
Its nebulous…but I think I recall dying, the haze
of the unknown and the bright light guiding me,
birthing canal of Spirit, attendant midwives of Destiny
awaiting. Yet now that Im back, the paradigm of the dead
and of dying
has invariably shifted. I no longer approximate death as lack of breath,
but rather refusal of belief,
that we’ve run out of things to resurrect,
the stubborn insistence that each day there are no people, or dreams,
or goals worth cherishing and cleaving to;
That there isn’t a little bit of Bethany in all of us
begging to be called forth from tombs of despair.

-------------------John 11:40-44
Jesus said to her, “Did I not say to you that if you would believe you would see the glory of God?” Then they took away the stone from the place where the dead man was lying. And Jesus lifted up His eyes and said, “Father, I thank You that You have heard Me.  And I know that You always hear Me, but because of the people who are standing by I said this, that they may believe that You sent Me.”  Now when He had said these things, He cried with a loud voice, “Lazarus, come forth!”  And he who had died came out bound hand and foot with graveclothes, and his face was wrapped with a cloth. Jesus said to them, “Loose him, and let him go.”