POETRY
The Weight of God
The sky does not split.
No curtain lifts.
Afternoon keeps its appointments:
dogs barking,
bread cooling on windowsills,
a child practicing scales
in the next room
while God bleeds outside the city.
They finish efficiently.
Iron through flesh,
flesh through bone:
a skill perfected by repetition.
Someone wipes his hands on his tunic,
wonders if his wife remembered
the lentils.
He hangs like a question
no one wants to answer.
Not thunder. Not glory.
Just weight:
the hard grammar of gravity
holding divinity in place.
Even the faithful step back.
Love falters
when it smells like iron,
when salvation looks identical
to another failed man.
The sky darkens anyway,
as if ashamed.
The earth holds its breath
but does not yet release it.
This is how it ends,
we think.
God learning abandonment,
learning how far down
love is willing to go.
Holy Saturday
Nothing happens today.
The women wait with spices
they cannot use.
The men hide in borrowed rooms,
reciting their failures
like psalms without tune.
The stone stays shut.
The body stays gone.
Heaven says nothing.
This is the day we recognize:
when prayers return unopened,
when faith feels like a match
cupped in wind,
when God appears to have misjudged
the cost of love.
Somewhere beneath the earth
a heart no longer beats,
and yet —
something presses back,
a pressure building
where death thought it had finished.
If redemption is coming,
it is late.
If resurrection is real,
it is quiet.
We sit with our doubt
like mourners at a wake,
waiting to see
if the dead will stay dead.
The Gardener Calls Her Name
She mistakes him at first
for someone ordinary:
which may be resurrection’s
truest detail.
A man among trees.
Soil under his nails.
Morning doing what it always does.
She is crying,
because love remembers too much,
because hope is dangerous
after burial.
Then her name:
not thunder,
not sermon,
just breath
and recognition.
The wound remains.
The scars stay open.
Resurrection does not undo the body;
it redeems it.
Death has been robbed,
not destroyed:
a thief startled mid-act,
dropping what it cannot carry.
He does not stay.
He never does.
Faith must learn to live
without holding on.
But the garden is altered.
The air keeps his voice.
The future breaks open
like a tomb
that has lost its argument.
And we,
still carrying our Fridays,
still limping through Saturdays —
are invited
not to certainty,
but to follow
a risen God
who looks, at first,
like a stranger
calling us by name.
David Anson Lee is a physician, philosopher, and poet whose work appears in Right Hand Pointing, Unbroken Journal, The Scarred Tree, and other literary journals. He writes on faith, human resilience, and the intersections of body, spirit, and daily life, seeking to illuminate spiritual truths through evocative imagery and lyrical narrative.
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