For Easter, here are two poems, inspired again by the Christian Wiman interview. The first, Gerard Manley Hopkins’s “That Nature is a Heraclitean Fire and of the comfort of the Resurrection,” is, I would argue, neither primarily about Incarnation or about Crucifixion but instead about the cosmic relevance of the Resurrection. It also reminds me of the theology of Maximus the Confessor. The second, Mary Karr’s “Descending Theology: The Resurrection,” was one that Wiman himself mentioned in the interview as a poem about the Resurrection. Karr’s poem reminds me of the communal relevance of the Resurrection. And thus, it reminds me of the theology of Augustine of Hippo. Both, of course, are deeply Pauline (cf. Rom. 8 and 1 Cor. 12, among many others, of course)

Be sure to check out Karr’s poem “The Devil’s Delusion” and Wiman’s  poem “Witness” in the latest print issue of Commonweal.

That Nature is a Heraclitean Fire and of the comfort of the Resurrection

By Gerard Manley Hopkins

Cloud-puffball, torn tufts, tossed pillows | flaunt forth, then chevy on an air-

Built thoroughfare: heaven-roysterers, in gay-gangs | they throng; they glitter in marches.

Down roughcast, down dazzling whitewash, | wherever an elm arches,

Shivelights and shadowtackle ín long | lashes lace, lance, and pair.

Delightfully the bright wind boisterous | ropes, wrestles, beats earth bare

Of yestertempest’s creases; | in pool and rut peel parches

Squandering ooze to squeezed | dough, crust, dust; stanches, starches

Squadroned masks and manmarks | treadmire toil there

Footfretted in it. Million-fuelèd, | nature’s bonfire burns on.

But quench her bonniest, dearest | to her, her clearest-selvèd spark

Man, how fast his firedint, | his mark on mind, is gone!

Both are in an unfathomable, all is in an enormous dark

Drowned. O pity and indig | nation! Manshape, that shone

Sheer off, disseveral, a star, | death blots black out; nor mark

                            Is any of him at all so stark

But vastness blurs and time | beats level. Enough! the Resurrection,

A heart’s-clarion! Away grief’s gasping, | joyless days, dejection.

                            Across my foundering deck shone

A beacon, an eternal beam. | Flesh fade, and mortal trash

Fall to the residuary worm; | world’s wildfire, leave but ash:

                            In a flash, at a trumpet crash,

I am all at once what Christ is, | since he was what I am, and

This Jack, joke, poor potsherd, | patch, matchwood, immortal diamond,

                            Is immortal diamond.

Descending Theology: The Resurrection

By Mary Karr

From the far star points of his pinned extremities,

cold inched in—black ice and squid ink—

till the hung flesh was empty.

Lonely in that void even for pain,

he missed his splintered feet,

the human stare buried in his face.

He ached for two hands made of meat

he could reach to the end of.

In the corpse’s core, the stone fist

of his heart began to bang

on the stiff chest’s door, and breath spilled

back into that battered shape. Now

it’s your limbs he comes to fill, as warm water

shatters at birth, rivering every way.