Myrrh in the Mouth

Praise curdles in my mouth, Risen Christ.
I taste it turning — milk to gall, hymn to a blade —
because you stand radiant
above a world still wet with cruelty,
and all your dawn,
for all its white fire,
still smells of burial spices.

I do not know whether to bless you
or strike your name against the stone again.
My throat is a narrow room.
My tongue drags myrrh and iron.
Below your lifted hands the murdered keep happening.
The earth does not close.
The blood does not finish speaking.
What am I praising
when the flies still choose the wounds of children,
when grief goes on kneeling in the road
with its raw mouth open?

Yet you do not step back.
You stand there
with death’s perfume clinging to the seams of light,
with the tomb not washed from you,
with the nails still burning like small suns through the wrists.
You are not clean of it.
That is what undoes me.
You have not come back sweet.
You have come back scented with the place they laid you,
aloes, myrrh, the shut rock, the dark linen,
and something sharper —
the unsurrendered stench of empire,
the animal heat of fear,
my own heart when it would rather accuse than adore.

So I accuse.
I say: What good is your rising
to the woman whose son is still taken,
to the man chewing dust beside the ditch,
to the body not yet found,
to the long obedience of sorrow?
I say it into your brightness
and the brightness does not flinch.
It enters.

Not as answer.
As wound.

It lays itself along my throat.
It pries the jaw from anger.
It floods the lungs.
I breathe and the burial room breaks open in my ribs.
I breathe and the stone rolls through my chest.
I breathe and the spice of your grave
goes hot, goes living, goes everywhere —
until my accusation is no longer mine,
until it burns with you,
until my mouth cannot keep its borders,
until the cry and the blessing use the same blood.

Now when I say Lord
it comes out torn.
Now when I say Christ
my tongue bleeds light.
Now praise is not praise.
It is a hand thrust into the side,
it is fingers learning the wound by heart,
it is refusing every polished resurrection
that does not reek of the tomb.

Stay there, then —
not above the world,
but in it,
rank with myrrh,
bright with piercedness,
breathing among the butchered and the waiting.
Stand in my mouth until I cannot speak
without opening.
Stand in my breath until every hallelujah
carries its grave-cloth,
until blessing itself breaks
like a jar at your feet
and the whole house fills
with the smell of death made unable
to keep its dead.