My carefully curated collection
has been well-tended, as has yours;
We stayed with the cross long after
Christ himself had ascended into heaven,
our suffering selves sanctified
and idolised
and the meaning of his supposed death lost on us
Do not make a special case for suffering:
those velvet-bound exhibits in their glass cabinets,
however precious, do not confer nobility nor special
blessings
(I believed that my soul would profit, but that was a lie).
We fetishised the cross, and postponed the resurrection.
Powerful poem. It resonates deeply with me. My own museum is pretty well-tended, yet I've lost track of all its artifacts in my mind. They're uncategorized and uncatalogued, other than generally, as the painful relics of my life. I hope I can dust them off and let them go. I don't think they have the value the curator in me believed they did when she married us both to the idea of preserving then forever.
ReplyDeleteThank you so much for this, Anonymous. I've only just found your comment, hence my long delay in responding! I love your last sentence, and I can very much relate. The curator in me (very earnestly and sincerely) believed that the relics had to be kept forever. Recently, I've had a sense of the past being laid to rest, having been dusted off. Wishing you well.
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