Palm Sunday Pietà, 1998

from Miracle Strip by Matt Layne

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lyrics

Palm Sunday Pietà, 1998

I. Take this tattered cloth of sorrow
from my back and wrap me in a cloak of words.
Comfort me with syllables soft and silken;
whisper me the warmth of wine,
so I might forget these winter-storms that are cold wounds
and so slow to heal.
Shadow and light play across our faces
like water reflecting up.
I need the soothe of your voice to lullaby me to sleep.

II. Let me hold you like a pietà;
let your body drape my body like a blanket.
I will bathe these whipped wounds of yours with salve of song
cooling-cloth-words to ease your body’s pain as your mother would.
Let this ointment soothe your tired old soul;
may it penetrate deep the God in your breast.
I will hold you through this life so brief
and rock you like a child again.
I will hold you until we grow cold-
hard as marble.
In the short breadth of my arms,
eternity exists.

III. Let the city fall silent;
let these empty streets be widowed.
A city afraid of itself, disappears,
leaves nothing behind
but the sound of crying in the night,
and even that sound is distant
as from another room.
The children have all fled in fear of their parents;
all the lovers have divorced;
the priests never were,
and these wounds gape wide and forever as an ocean.
The money, spent,
lies in a moldering pile,
while churches and institutions
are strewn about
no more than stones.
Vultures circle to land,
and the dogs:
an angry mob.
These lamentations have no solace in a world absent you.

credits

from Miracle Strip, released August 31, 2022

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about

Matt Layne Birmingham, Alabama

Poet, librarian, raconteur; Matt Layne has been poking hornet's nests and looking under rocks since he was knee-high to a peanut peg.
I reckon you oughta check him out.