Whom do you seek?

All they could was dance,
Dance to the joy of their savior risen.
Let him dance with us, they implored,
After plague and death destroyed their lives
And even burial became a luxury
Where corpses lined the streets and roads.
Where else could we dance to escape decay?
They asked their bishop. And the bishop—
Who survived—agreed with them.
When Easter came, they found a weaver
With his treadle loom and cloth:
Make it large, they said, to cover a tomb.
He wove three-in-one herringbone and
The bishop approved in honor of the Trinity.
Then they painted carefully—
Only a handful of artists were still alive—
First his face, and chest and hands
On one side of their sepulchral sheet.
Then his head and back and legs on the other.
They painted thorns around his brow
And then they painted red around his face.
As for his limbs, his chest and hands,
They showered him in streaks of crimson.
And when the liturgy was sung,
Three on each side gripping like a kite
They bore his likeness out before the altar
And they danced. ‘O! See how he is risen!’
They danced in honor of their escape,
Even as death lingered like a sore about the villages.
‘Let us do this every year!’ they said.
‘Let us dance with the risen lord!’
Then with reverence they stored their artifact
Not knowing, boxed, how it would travel
Down the centuries of forgetfulness—and never dance again—
But stiffen behind a wall of glass,
Not knowing with what blindness their descendants
Would misconceive their grateful handiwork.

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This poem also appears in the April 2023 issue of U.S. Catholic (Vol. 88, No. 4, page 8). Click here to subscribe to the magazine.