After the Waiting

When the risen Christ was said to lift away
from the olive hill, leaving the sky bright with gold,
the story tells of silence falling—
the world holding its breath.

They waited then
for the dove,
for the sudden fire.

But nothing came.

The leaves trembled in the same wind
as before.

We live, it seems, in that same interval—
not between promise and fulfillment
but between a promise
and the slow knowledge that it was only a promise.

The gardens we imagined
are not behind some guarded gate.

They were never there.

The cherubim sing to no one.

Still the earth continues:
fields hard with stone,
brambles along the path,
bodies learning again the language of dust.

No spirit descends.
No flame crowns the air.

The temples remain quiet.

And yet the sea keeps breathing
under the long twilight.

The wind moves through the trees
without needing a name.

Perhaps that is enough.

We walk the old roads anyway,
carrying what hope we can make ourselves—
not heaven’s fire,
not Eden restored,

only the stubborn light of being here

in a world
that asks nothing of us

except that we live in it.