Holy Week Poem: Wednesday

Spikenard - Joseph Dalton Hooker. Wiki image

Spikenard and Ash

She moved like silence
in a room full of eyes,
broke the jar
like a prophet breaks the sky.

No words,
Just oil
- and the scent of burial.

The men coughed,
like they'd inhaled scandal.

She poured a year's wage
on his worn feet,
and wiped them with her
dignity undone.

And the church-
still,
at times,
finds itself
in the crucible of
pain and suffering.

There, it pours itself out-
in hostels and prisons,
war zones and refugee camps,
where the broken bodies
of the world
become its altar.

Worship spills like spikenard
from hands that serve.

It anoints where
hope is fragile,
bearing the
fragrance of grace
amid the ashes.

They called it waste.

He called it beautiful.

While they plotted with knives,
she ministered with myrrh.

While they counted silver,
she counted it joy
to anoint a
dead man walking.

Perhaps
the angels held their breath
as glory filled the cracks.

Ashes and spikenard.

A woman,
a Christ,
and the scent of the end
which smells like the beginning.

Listen to Rev John reading this poem: https://youtu.be/TzBj9tq2yKI

Rev Jon Swales is a theologian and poet who ministers to marginalised and vulnerable adults at Lighthouse, Leeds
See: www.cruciformjustice.com