exit. He
returned to tell his
tale of how
He slipped through
Death’s fingers: listen through your
fingertips, touching

to feel the
words of the tale, the
cadence of
his living
breath, His opened wound smiling
at your disbelief.

Written 4/27/11
© 2011 Nicole Nicholson. All Rights Reserved.
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Another poem using the shadorma form for the stanzas, also focusing on Easter. Enjoy.

-Nicole

wounds and a
life lost to love. But
this vessel
is filled and
a once dead man walks. Through these
holes, nothing leaks out.

Written 4/27/11
© 2011 Nicole Nicholson. All Rights Reserved.
————————————————–
This is the first of a few shadormas that I am writing, as I’ve been intrigued by the form and have been wanting to try it out. Unfortunately, I can’t seem to contain myself to one complete shadorma, so I am using the form to construct my stanzas in these short poems. Enjoy.

-Nicole

A pair of urns, thrown against the belly bark skin of a tree
and busted. The fruit hanging above, pointing down
in double-edged swords, falls like icicles around the collection of shards
lying at the base of the tree. When you eat this fruit,
you walk away with a belly full of knives that
jostle as you walk, points reaching forth and bearing edges
that split open your gut to reveal you
as a naked, muscled skeleton underneath. Who told you
that you were naked?

The edges of your flayed glory
curl back to let the knives glisten inside your opened ribcage
for your Maker to see. You sword-swallowed
for secrets, drunk by a temptation tongue
already bisected and bleeding venom past teeth and lips:
a schizophrenic angel’s work. He honed the blade,
divined where to place its edge, and then cleaved you
asunder. You wish you could hear the last song of roses
as the point of another angel’s fire blade bites into your back
to make you march: but the clang of knife blades colliding in your chest
dim out their last few notes as you are marched out of the garden,
never to return.

II.

Another garden, another urn. This one is tipped over,
spilling blood, sweat, tears, prayers, and roses
out of His mouth and onto the ground. The young man
is on his knees, pleading for the chalice with the
jagged, glass-shattered edge to pass by His lips
without demanding its deepest draught:
the chalice of nails, whips, roughly hewn wood, thorns,
and sword. But it will not leave, and the roses
at His feet shiver, already feeling thorns
growing backwards into their skins and burying their tips
until the points reach and wound their cores. Under
the night’s watchful midnight moon eye, he quickly
gathers the roses up and slides them back into the urn
before he is stolen away by the guards
to become a man of spilled roses and broken pottery shards.

III.

The sun’s eye slowly opens on
another garden, this time growing up
around a scrubbed white tomb,
cradling it with green and floral arms. The shattered urn
inside the tomb has taken three days to knit Himself
together. The rose petals were ripped away and scattered
by wind, rumor, and the bottoms of frightened sandaled feet
fleeing away to hide from marching armies of nails and crosses with
their names upon their tongues: but in this morning’s eastern sunrise,
they slowly arrive from every direction,
floating in a cloud congregation above the sealed tomb. And they
knit themselves together: petal to petal to stem to pistil to stamen
until they are a family of long-stemmed blooms
again.

The stone is pried away from the mouth of the tomb. The mended urn
is just inside, and the roses fall into His mouth, finding
rest again, standing stately inside and casting out their
fragrance. The young man’s eyes open, and He rises up
from the rough stone slab inside where
shard by shard by piece have been pulled together for three days,
erasing the jagged seams of His breaking as each piece
clicked back into place. As He exits the tomb, the first thing He smells
is the roses, gathered and blooming near the opened mouth and
the defeated stone rolled onto its back with its eyes
shut to the burgeoning daylight. The roses
are the first things that greet Him as He emerges
into the newly awakened world.

Written 4/23/11
© 2011 Nicole Nicholson. All Rights Reserved.

But the skin has now been shed: a suit of clothes
dropped to the ankles, stepped out of, and left behind
after being first jarred loose by whip and nail and then
molted off in tremors of pain while
the ice climbed up through my core from stern to bow.
The lamb is spent, lying quiet and dead on the altar
while the smoke of its burning rises up
to my Father’s nose. And I walk,
carrying a key.

The world seems to streak and smear around me
as I move, undulating from the surface of my spirit
out in a ring of coronas: Mother, wrapped in black and pondering silent
inside an empty house; Miriam, walking sleeplessly
with sunken eyes scrubbed red by tears; Simon Kefa,
running his heart through with a cock crow’s sword;
and Yehuda, now hanging out to dry
of life and blood in a barren field. Out from there,
the rest of the hushed and bewildered city,
and then the world. I walk, carrying this key,
watching the world blur around me as I descend
a flight of stairs. A cold welcome carpet creeps up,
rising to meet my feet: but it soon recedes. I grip the key in my hands
more tightly and make my way towards the door
and the lock. The souls behind them have been waiting
for too long.

Written 4/21/11
© 2011 Nicole Nicholson. All Rights Reserved.

Somewhere in an apartment above the street,
an urn falls and breaks.
The roses inside tumble to the floor and
lie helpless and unsettled among the shards of the body
that used to hold them. Their scent
still floats around them in an unseen aura
and levitates upward, touching the stone ceiling above
their heads. Below them on the street, the torn rose blooms
also waft their final songs up to a clean, vacant, and cloudless sky.
And the King walks past the dying rose blooms
to become a broken urn Himself. Groaning and struggling
underneath a wooden cross, He feels
the clay of his body already beginning to crack. Through each fissure,
the scent of roses slips surreptitiously out
and intertwines with the other fragrances calling up
from the window and the street.

Written 4/21/11
© 2011 Nicole Nicholson. All Rights Reserved.
——————————————————
This poem was written for NaPoWriMo and for We Write Poems Prompt #51: Pairings. We were asked to pair two opposite things in our poems: given that this past weekend was Easter weekend, I chose the theme of life/death and roses/thorns. I hope you enjoyed the poem.

-Nicole
——————————————————

Stumble It!

The ache, the agony,
the breath being pulled out of his lungs
like ribbons by an unseen hand: they all draw
her cloak and train closer to fly over this spot. All
weave her raiment thread by thread: eli, eli,
lama sabachthani. Another thread: Son,behold
your mother. Woman, behold your son. And the final pass
of the weaver’s loom: it is finished.
The cloak, mantle, and train are complete. Death stands
on the hill, her proud, ghastly, and shadowy garments
unfurled to the sky. Behind her, the sun
turns away his face with sorrow. And somewhere, a temple curtain
rents itself like so many outer garments.

Sack cloth on the sun: ashes on the earth’s face
as fire consumes a life and leaves
the flakes of its passion at the foot of a wooden cross.
If you ask the man later about the fire, He might tell you
that He only felt ice crawling up His limbs and veins
as the world and the heavens receded. But not
right now: you won’t find Him. He has shed His mantle, and
is walking.

Written 4/21/11
© 2011 Nicole Nicholson. All Rights Reserved.

Those shepherds, they have
cast the dream dust from their lashes to
see you tonight. In a dimly lit corner
the heralded gifts have been laid, glowing but not quite enough
to rival your entrance and your unseen crown. There is
that golden shawl of song still pouring from angel throats and harps
just beyond the hills. Though my lips do not move, I am
joining them with the swell of a new mother’s ripened heart. Maybe,
as you lie pressed to my chest, you can hear the notes
escaping through my ribcage. It is the first lullaby
you will ever hear.

Written 12/7/10
© 2010 Nicole Nicholson. All Rights Reserved.

———————————————————-
This week’s poem was written for We Write Poems Prompt #31: Love. I chose to focus on one character of the Christmas story, Mary, getting personal with her feelings and reactions at the birth of Jesus. I hope you enjoyed the poem.

-Nicole
———————————————————

Stumble It!

——————————-

Even this door reaches for Heaven. A
perfect semi-circle arc, a bald head of cedar,
a dome crown hewn by hands like yours. I remember
your palms, how they were a perfect copy of
this door in callous and scar. How you dug into wood
and shaped it. Did you see your own body, begging for
nails, in every plank of cedar or beam of pine
that used to cross your father’s workshop floor? You must have
had an impulse to connect wood to wood and make it
intersect, turn yourself into a living tree with your
top scrapping the underbelly of a ninth hour sky. That day, she
tore herself apart and wept for you with lightning, traded
her blue veils for ash-and-sackcloth clouds that were
gray like the lump ghost behind my larynx: it has been
living there for three days and will not leave.

I have nails too, Rabbi. Thirty of them.
They sleep a mirrored sleep, those coins,
babbling softly in my purse. They cannot replace
ragged skin, the small tattered emblems of a life calling purpose
from the bodies of wood. Those tokens on your work-worn hands
whispered gentle scratches into mine when you clasped them,
on the night that you told me how I would die: you will
sacrifice the man that clothes me. Just like
the wood, you always called up art from us twelve:
we were a crowd of bearded children with
eyes affixed to your star. But I cannot supernova like you:

instead, there is a vacant field
that will hold my dying light. That light
will ease out of my body, drain out of my throat while
my star is hung from the arms of an unwilling tree. If you
ever find that tree, ask her how I exited. She will tell you that I did it
without any nails inside my wrists.

Written 6/2/10
© 2010 Nicole Nicholson. All Rights Reserved. Sections in italics quoted from the Gospel of Judas.

—————————————————–
This week’s poem was written for We Write Poems Prompt #4: Doors courtesy of Wayne Pitchko. I think this poem is pretty self-explanatory: I’ll just note that I used the Gospel of Judas, which claims that Jesus asked Judas to hand him over to be crucified, as the inspiration for this piece. I hope you enjoyed the poem.

-Nicole
———————————————————-

Stumble It!