Piercing the Shroud: 2 poems by Ellen Jane Powers
- 2 days ago
- 2 min read
Piercing the Shroud
Surrounded by collisions,
I feel their fragments
prick the corners
of my sleep.
In the confusion,
I stop to view
a dream
of the resurrection.
Light spills
from the feet
of Christ
onto me,
splintered
from a night
of survival.
I wake
to the oblivion
of day.
Intersections
no longer visible.
Crossings
darkened by thought.
I walk
out of myself
and into You,
disappearing
into
the windy light
of revelation.
*
Taking Up the Cross
1.
The valley is filling with words,
hard and sharp as flint and thorns.
He looks toward the hills beyond,
its altars smoky with cedar,
and tastes the sweet aroma.
More words stomp the ground,
more words shake the rocks,
more words crowd the air.
I thirst, he says, as he looks upward.
2.
There were walnut orchards and
wild grasses along the shore when
he sat on a hillside and spoke.
His words had spilled over the people,
like when the sky suddenly becomes day.
Here, no room for his words, doors
closed all around him.
It is finished, he says,
as clouds cast their shadows on the hill.
3.
Words vibrate and hum in the distance
as silence seeps into the air around him.
He inhales, hears a faint echo,
words piercing the darkening sky.
Into your hands, he whispers as
his breath withdraws, the wind opening
a door to an inner room.
Scripture references: John, chapter 19 and Luke, chapter 23
________________________
Ellen Jane Powers lives once more in her childhood home on the North Shore
of Boston and recently retired from corporate life as a software engineer. Through
the years she’s been a substitute church organist and finds connection to God
through music and the written word. Her poems have appeared most recently in
Amethyst Review and Heart of Flesh, and she has a chapbook, Toward the Beloved,
and a volume of poems, Celestial Navigation.
(August 2026 issue)
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