Lenten Sonnets - Week 1

Lent is the season of repentance and reflection during which we look toward Palm Sunday, Holy Week, Good Friday, and Resurrection Sunday. As an aid in that task, I am offering one sonnet for each of the seven weeks of this season. These sonnets are part of a corona, literally a "crown," or cycle of sonnets linked by their last-and-first lines. They are based on seven of the stations of the cross, six of which are canonical and one traditional. I invite you to ponder them, perhaps reading each one daily through out its given week, as a way of entering Christ's sacrifice for us.  The full cycle appears in my chapbook, Nothing There Is Not More: Poems of Faith Through Doubt, published by Finishing Line Press. The book is due out later this month and you can order a copy or learn more here.

1. Christ Falls the First Time

Here falls he first and knows that he must rise.

On this flint bosom her condemned Lord

Would snuggle as the swaddled infant lies,

These public stones his secret, stable ward.

A rude beginning when there was no room

Makes now less rued this resting from the rood.

They would have stoned him when it was too soon,

Now seeks he stones to bathe with salty rheum.

But yet redemption lies a weary way

Ahead and Roman pikes yet pry and prod,

A seven-sentence sermon yet to say,

A hangman yet to name him Son of God.

He rises, struggles onward for the prize,

Then falls again to find he cannot rise.