“Your ears doubt that Winter howls in ache.
The absence of You from Him.
But His hands hold your approach.
He feels the bleeding of Your resurrection.
All through love.”

A familiar phantom voice whispers at the back of my ear, my vision widening from a nondescript hypnotic void, to a brewing morning sky beyond the hills.

There’s an abandoned Victorian house, of sun bleached black, decaying upon one of those far off hills.
My passenger, who goes by no name, points to it through the breaking gilded light.
My eyes cloud over, curtains of thought billow in the breeze, my gaze refocuses...a telephoto lens,
To the trees hanging the weight of overnight rain, orbs of prognostication crashing to the earth.

The grass beyond, rolling fields of new green, elicits goosebumps at the mere thought of the cold sway and cling of the blades to my bare feet and legs.

My nameless passenger begs that I not venture to the hilltop. That I not allow myself to be drawn out.
I defy her mounting fears, putting the car in park, and allowing the pull on my soul to direct me.

Going by foot to my calling, minutes pass like hours, as my heart anxiously vacates her post, joining my side, before ghosting herself through me, into the pit of my core.

My destination met, in the crumbling stone walls of a freethinking garden, growing this way and that, my heart crawls towards a thin veil of flesh, a window to the seasons I've written, alive in petals and stamens, herbs and poisons.

And there He stands, faceless and adorned in all black, His faith in me lain in the dark of a matchbox, held in the palm of His mud stained hand, a small plot of earth upturned and gaping.
My rib cage fails the impact of such a crush.

I'm subsequently growing, root to sky, coastline to mountain ridge, illustrating within my flesh obscura, my perseverance.

The eternal fire, that consumes my funeral pyre...that cauterizes my wounds...and gives life to my ruins, strikes the red phosphorous, burning the box into His palm, never stalling, and my gaze never faltering, not even at such a numbing sight.

"I grow. Despite the fact you can’t see my bloom, despite the fact you've dug my grave...I flourish. I die and I breathe life over and over again. If only you had faith in my resilience.”

His palm, a charred chalice of flesh, stirs of its own accord, vibrating with movement, as young legs dig out from the cadaverous remains, a cicada resting in His hand, before ascending on instinct to the vacant canvas of His visage, shedding and emerging anew.

Gobsmacked, I forget how to breathe, lost in the realization of His words...of His love...

E.A. O'Connell (July 2015)