Where?
“I do not know where they’ve laid him.’
Though incense sweetens the stench, the air is still sick.
Cassocks of white walk between
The boxes without being, row on row.
All the while, the soldiers watch.
Wearing grief like gauze
As they wait for the makeshift mourning to end.
And then they load them, this cargo of caskets.
Ceaselessly, they are taken to be dropped
In plots of plundered soil.
There, they lie unmarked in peaceless parks.
No crosses guard their graves.
We pick at old wounds,
And plague pits reopen.
The ground scabs
But soon it will scar.
Were there no graves in Egypt,
No plague pits in the past
That you led us here, my God?
Were the church bells too quiet for you
When, even yesterday, before all this,
We laid our friends to rest in land already laden with decay?
Did you do nothing as we wandered this way?
Not every question has an answer, but some do.
“Where have you laid him?”
She cried, as He had cried
Beside another’s grave.
Emmanuel, God with us,
God with us beside the grave and in it.
“He is not here, He has risen."
The Ressurection, Cookham by Sir Stanley Spencer
