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POETRY

Thanksgiving for Christ’s Body

After Hebrews 10:5: “a body hast thou prepared for me”

Love begets the world — sharp-toothed, blood-
warm— and moves the Father’s hands to
knead Adam’s flesh from red clay, wet as birth,

Breathing into that same mortal architecture
the fearful symmetry of the Son’s immortal
body, life upon life, incarnate and burning.

This flesh was threaded through God’s
thoughts before time, before the first star
learned to bleed light.

In this same temple — skin stretched over
bone — Christ enters at twelve, a boy-blade
cutting through the scribes’ dusty certainties,

The law flows like mercury through His veins,
silver-bright, quicksilver-clean, the heart’s
master key that locks and unlocks the
chambers of the soul.

It trickles down the High Priest’s sleeve — this
blood-water, Spirit-baptism — from the Lamb
crowned in the thicket of thorns on Mount
Moriah, the righteous Victor,

The great I AM, who knows and wills with
diamond-hard certainty,

Who alone holds power like a fistful of Suns,

Unfailing light that looks into Himself and
becomes the victim, the wounded-Man, the
Priest who satisfies the Father’s hungry justice
with His own body and soul,

The righteousness that swallows Adam whole
and knits me to God with scarlet thread —

So that now I can look into myself without the
mirror shattering, without fear gnawing my
ribs, and will to be — I am now satisfied, in
beholding Him, knowing His wondrous law
carved into my pulse, forever and forever.

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Notes Taken by Moses about his Epiphany

After Exodus 3

Once I gorged on the marketplace of
thought — Now this scholar bleats among
stones. Nameless. Forty years of sheep-stink
and silence,

My hands forgetting papyrus, learning only the
dumb weight of wool, the stutter of hooves. I
thought: This is how a man dissolves — Into
mountain air, into the white noise of wind
through nothing.

Easy slippage into the grave’s rehearsal. No
one counting the days I do not return.

Then God — Like a match struck in my
skull — Splits the noon wide open. The bush
erupts: Green tongues speaking Flame, roots
drinking Fire, each leaf a small apocalypse
that will not consume.

I AM WHO I AM — The voice cracks like a
whip, like vertebrae snapping under the weight
of pure Being.

The Solitary One, who needs nothing, sustains
all, suddenly longing for communion, done
with His algorithmic loneliness.

He chooses me — not the burnished Cherubim,
not the perfect machinery of Angels, but this
cracked vessel, this exile with dirty fingernails
and a stutter that splits every sacred syllable.

The infinite contracts to the size of my fragile
ribs, pours His terrible purposes into the brittle
cup of my bones — I am the frail instrument He
will use to split history like kindling.

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Martin Luther — Thunderstruck

I was a bright coin in my father’s pocket,
Cicero’s rhetoric burning on my tongue like
acid, Latin and Greek sharp as surgical
instruments cutting through the dead air of
lecture halls. He wanted me carved into a
lawyer’s shape, his ambition a vise around my
ribs.

But I was already rotting from within — my
mother’s Catholic prayers, those black beads
clicking like bones in my fists, the music
bleeding from my fingertips while professors
chose me as their weapon, their golden boy to
slash with words instead of steel.

The scholastic debates were my opium —
those sweet probabilities, ethical puzzles about
heaven’s weight, God’s terrible face, the
mathematics of sin. I fed on them like a
starved thing.

Then the sky cracked open.

Six months past my master’s degree, walking
back like a sleepwalker when the storm seized
me by the throat. Lightning — that white-hot
needle of God — struck me down, pinned me
like a butterfly. “Saint Anne!” I screamed into
the electric darkness, “I will become a monk!”

The words flew from my mouth like ravens.

At twenty-one, plucked clean as a chicken, I
entered the black cloister — that tomb of living
men where I learned to count my sins like
rosary beads, each secret shame a small death
accumulating in my chest cavity.

I was utterly lost, God-forsaken, a worm in the
dark soil of despair. But even then — even as I
rotted — He had His fingers in my clay,
shaping me in my mother’s womb before
breath, before guilt, before the first lie
bloomed on my tongue.

Romans became my rack, my sweet torture.
Paul’s words about God’s love — that bright
impossibility — scraped against my raw
conscience. How could the Law and mercy
coexist in one terrible, beautiful body?

The revelation came like birth — violent,
necessary, slick with blood. Abraham’s faith:
not my striving, not my good works piled like
sandbags against the flood of judgment, but
God’s own faith given freely, a transfusion of
grace pumping through my starved veins.

When justice broke its spine, they dragged
Jesus to His cross — that wooden altar where
He bled without one thought for His own skin.
They threw Him in the ground with criminals,
this man who never bruised a soul or let one
false word slip His lips.

But God had always planned this feast of pain,
this offering that would birth life from death’s
black womb — life upon life upon life, eternal
and bright as arterial blood.

Christ stared death down like a lover meeting
his beloved’s eyes, obeyed each commandment
of agony with perfect, terrible grace.

So God lifted Him up like a trophy, cancelled
Adam’s debt — that ancient mortgage on our
souls — with one signature of resurrection.

From that divine labor, that cosmic childbirth
of the cross, the Righteous One makes
righteous ones. He makes even me clean.

Now I am dressed in His brightness, robed in
borrowed light I cannot earn, joyous as a
madman finally freed from his chains.

The thunder that struck me down was mercy
wearing the mask of wrath. The lightning that
should have killed me instead delivered me,
bright and terrible, into His electric hands.

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Nicos Kaloyirou: I was born on the island of Cyprus. My family migrated to Australia as refugees when I was twelve years of age. I was educated at the University of Adelaide in South Australia, receiving a Bachelor’s and Master’s degree in Law. I came to believe in Christ whilst studying at university. The book The Genesis Flood by Whitcomb and Morris had a great impact on my life. I was also entranced by the writings of C.S. Lewis, especially his Narnia Chronicles and Mere Christianity. I have published poems and articles in the AP online journal (Australian Presbyterian Church). I have a legal article on “Causality” published in the Flinders University Law Journal and a theological article in Perichoresis Journal, “Good faith and Authenticity in Christ’s Self-Disclosure.” My current employment is as a Lawyer in South Australia.

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Image: pietà di berlino by Giovanni Bellini, Public domain, via Wikimedia Commons.