Good Friday

        When we find good poetry, we know it right away. Nothing shoddy or maudlin here; nothing “homey”. This poem is too powerful to save just for Easter. We need to feel its force right now— read the poem as if it were your own words. For straight talk to one’s heart, few can match Christina Rossetti’s Good Friday:

 

Am I a stone and not a sheep

That I can stand, O Christ,  beneath Thy Cross,
To number drop by drop Thy Blood’s slow loss,
And yet not weep?

Not so those women loved

Who with exceeding grief lamented Thee;
Not so fallen Peter weeping bitterly;
Not so the thief was moved;

Not so the Sun and Moon
Which hid their faces in a starless sky,
A horror of great darkness at broad noon—
I, only I.

Yet give not o’er,

But seek Thy sheep, true Shepherd of the flock;
Greater than Moses, turn and look once more
And smite a rock.