For the first time
I arrive at Easter
without the weight.
No breaking.
No thunder.
Just an exhale
that does not return.
Years inside the scaffolding
of sound and light,
of words spoken on cue,
until a quieter voice
outlasted them.
Nothing supernatural.
Nothing hidden.
Only the slow admission
that the sky
does not answer.
The tomb, then,
is not a place
but a space left open
after the story was written
backward
from grief.
Once
this would have been loss.
Now
it is clarity.
Strip it down:
a man,
too certain or not certain enough,
moving toward a machine
that does not pause.
The State does not hate.
It processes.
And what it cannot use
it removes.
We have done this before.
We will do it again.
Call it sacrifice
if it helps you sleep.
Call it what it is
if you want to stay awake.
The cross is not sacred.
It is familiar.
A system
closing around a voice
that refused to close.
You can still see it happening
if you look
without needing it to mean more.
And yet
he does not stay gone.
Not in the way bodies stay gone.
They tried to end him
with certainty,
with wood,
with law,
with finality.
But memory
does not obey orders.
It moves.
It spreads
without permission.
It gathers in the mouths
of those who could not accept
silence.
So they told it differently.
A stone moved.
A garden disturbed.
A figure walking
where no one should walk.
Not lies.
Compensation.
The mind
refusing burial.
They raised him
the only way we ever raise anything:
by telling it
again
and again
until it cannot be contained
in one life.
I stand now
behind the scenes.
Cables.
Lighting cues.
Sound checks.
The machinery of belief
runs smoothly
when maintained.
I do my part.
Not because it is true
in the way we once meant truth,
but because it is human
in the way that matters.
They come
not for facts
but for relief.
For a sentence
strong enough
to hold back death
for an hour.
For a song
that says
this is not all.
I no longer say it with them.
But I understand
why it must be said.
This year
I will not look upward.
No searching the sky
for interruption.
I will look
at faces.
At the quiet insistence
that suffering
must be answered
even if the answer
is made.
We take what breaks us
and refuse
to leave it broken.
We build meaning
where none was given.
We insist
on continuation.
The tomb is empty.
Not because something rose
but because we would not leave it
full.
And in that space
cleared by refusal,
by grief,
by invention,
there is finally room
for what remains:
not miracle,
not proof,
but the thin, durable thread
of what we choose
to carry forward.
