Jingle’s Poetry Rally–“April Eighth”

English: Full-length photograph of the Shroud of Turin which is said to have been the cloth placed on Jesus at the time of his burial. Română: O repoducere fotografică în întregime a Sfântului Giulgiului despre care se spune că a fost folosit pentru a acoperi corpul lui Iisus în timpul înmormântării sale. (Photo credit: Wikipedia)

An article in the Smithsonian
alluded to the Holy
Shroud of Turin.
The image of Christ
seared radiologically
into a burial cloth.
A violent burst of energy.
A life-seed
in a closed space
blowing out boundaries.
Stories of an empty tomb.

Easter comes early
this year.
Daffodils explode in
the front garden,
sheltered by a warm wall.

April eighth,
nineteen forty-four.
A seed plummets to earth,
wrapped in a metal
death-womb.
Ejaculated from heaven,
it burrows into dank soil.
Buried.
Fragmented.
Combusted in another
surge of energy.

Months go by:
a year to the day.
Someone in the
War Department
types the letter on
a piece of onion-skin paper.
Words smudged by an
over-used ribbon tell
the woman to move on with her life.
The child will never call him
daddy.

Footnote: a few years ago Easter Sunday landed on April 8th, the anniversary of my father’s death. He was killed in WWII when I was 3 months old.