Easter Day: Station XV and a new Easter Aubade

 

the sun is on the rise

The Lord is Risen! He is risen indeed Alleluia!

For this Easter morning I am posting the fifteenth and final sonnet from my Stations of the Cross sequence, but also adding a new Easter poem, which takes the form of an Aubade, a traditional form, set as a dialogue between lovers and the break of day. I have taken a genre of secular love poetry and set it in a new, spiritually resonant key, imagining a dialogue between Christ and the Soul. This poem will appear in my next collection ‘After Prayer’ which is due out in the autumn. As the poem is also a dialogue between bride and groom, Maggie, my wife, has kindly read the bride’s part on the recording.

This sonnet, and the others I have been posting for Holy Week are all drawn from my collection Sounding the Seasons, published by Canterbury Press here in England. The book is now back in stock on both Amazon UK and USA It is now also out on Kindle. Please feel free to make use of these sonnets in church services and to copy and share them. If you can mention the book from which they are taken that would be great.

As usual you can hear the poems by clicking on the title or the ‘play’ button if it appears

XV Easter Dawn

He blesses every love which weeps and grieves

And now he blesses hers who stood and wept

And would not be consoled, or leave her love’s

Last touching place, but watched as low light crept

Up from the east. A sound behind her stirs

A scatter of bright birdsong through the air.

She turns, but cannot focus through her tears,

Or recognise the Gardener standing there.

She hardly hears his gentle question ‘Why,

Why are you weeping?’, or sees the play of light

That brightens as she chokes out her reply

‘They took my love away, my day is night’

And then she hears her name, she hears Love say

The Word that turns her night, and ours, to Day.

 

 

Aubade

And are you sleeping still my love?

The sun is on the rise,

A gentle west wind lifts the leaves,

And songbirds fill the skies.

 

I closed my eyes in sorrow love,

My heart as cold as stone,

And thought, as darkness covered me,

That I would lie alone.

 

I closed my eyes in weariness,

I closed my eyes in pain,

And never thought I should be called

To open them again.

 

But you were not alone my love,

Your weariness was mine,

I brought a light into the dark

That you might see it shine.

 

I too endured the deadly cold

That chilled us to the bone,

That I might warm the sepulchre

And roll away the stone.

 

Awaken now to life my love,

Arise alive and free,

Shake off the sleep of death my love,

And come away with me.

 

And she has risen from her bed

And held her arms out wide

And touched his wounded hands and heart

And gone to be his bride.