top of page

Lazarus

Writer's picture: Editorial StaffEditorial Staff

by Brian Volck


“e nardo e mirra son l’ultime fasce”*

-Dante, Inferno XXIV


What I first saw when they lifted the cloth

from my head were his eyes, still wet with tears,

and thought them shed for what I had suffered,

not knowing—as he did—how his own death

stood certain and soon, mine merely deferred.

Yet who among us was prepared for what

would come? Neighbors, fearing one once buried,

soon cursed me; dogs whimpered as I passed,

sniffing death’s stench as if I still stood bound

in rough sheets rank with the ooze of decay.

Only Mary, my sister, sensed his hour

had arrived as he sat with us again

days before that turbulent Passover,

intuiting without words occasion

to fill the room with more fitting fragrance.

Kneeling, she embalmed him from ankles down

with pungent spikenard dripping from her hands

as a servant might wash feet in water,

wiping the oily excess with unbound

locks of hair, clothing herself in his scent.

That is how I recognized his altered,

risen form: the wounded feet anointed

with aromatic nard and hints of myrrh

that mantled me as if in royal robes,

unmerited, but nonetheless conferred.

And now I find myself between two deaths,

longing to live more fully, awaiting

a body not discarded but renewed.

Though the grave demands another meeting,

in this, my scented shroud, I stand ready.


* “Nard and myrrh its (i.e. the Phoenix’s) final winding sheets,”


 

Brian Volck is a pediatrician who lives in Baltimore. He is the author of a poetry collection, Flesh Becomes Word (Dos Madres Press) and a memoir, Attending Others: A Doctor’s Education in Bodies and Words (Cascade Books). He teaches theology and medicine at St. Mary’s Seminary and University in Baltimore and is a Benedictine oblate at the Monastery of Christ in the Desert near Abiquiu, New Mexico.

57 views0 comments

Recent Posts

See All

Comments


bottom of page