Watch / listen to Kevin read “Easter Triptych.”
Notes on backstory, form, and references are below the poem.
Easter Triptych
The sunsets over door-posts fade to gloom
as praise and wailing mingle in one song.
Now free to follow God through fire and cloud,
we gaze beyond the serpent-sceptered priest,
who broke and crushed himself in that dark room
and garden, who with bruised heel tread upon
the crown; who shouldered exile for the crowd
condemning him in our redemption feast,
which finished with sunrise breaking from the tomb,
with gnashing teeth and hallelujahs drawn
at once from every mouth unwound of shroud—
we squint, cold faces lightening from the east.
See a sample of the book
Intro, TOC, and 10 of the 40+ poems
Notes on “Easter Triptych”
Backstory
A triptych, in the words of Google, is “a picture or relief carving on three panels, typically hinged together side by side and used as an altarpiece.” This poem presents three scriptural scenes related to Easter: the first Passover, the Last Supper, and the Resurrection. I wrote it because I love the Savior and was inspired, especially with the last stanza, by the music in the “Christ Visits the Spirit World” section of the Church’s 1992 “To This End Was I Born” video.
Form & Techniques
This poem’s quatrains are iambic pentameter, the same meter as much of Shakespeare, including his sonnets. However, I chose its rhyme scheme - ABCD ABCD ABCD - rather than a traditional ABAB CDCD EFEF to represent through the repeated rhyme pattern how the scenes relate to each other in sequence and symbolism. For example, you might have noticed this pattern:
Stanza 1 Line 1: sunset
Stanza 2 Line 1: night
Stanza 3 Line 1: sunrise
Also, the final lines in both stanzas 1 and 2 are enjambed, meaning they don’t end in complete sentences. This flow into the following stanza emphasizes the symbolic and thematic connection between each scene.
Explanations
Line 1: sunsets over door-posts – the word “sunsets” represents both the time of day as well as the painting of the Passover lamb’s blood over the doors of Israelite homes as described in Exodus 12:1-13.
2: praise and wailing mingled in one song – Describes both the Israelite and Egyptian responses to Passover as well as a central theme in the poem, that the song of redemption is probably not exclusively joyous: it cost Jesus the suffering and humiliation described in the second stanza, and also, I’m pretty sure that few people will experience either complete joy or complete remorse at whatever day of reckoning they face. Thus lines 9-10 describe “gnashing teeth and hallelujahs drawn / at once from every mouth.”
The divine dividing of wheat from tares, of sheep from goats, simplify the human experience in ways that can promote both righteous justice and unrighteous judgment; this poem celebrates the Savior of morally complex, even ambivalent, actors—whom the Russian author Aleksandr Solzhenitsyn famously described thus: “The line dividing good and evil cuts through the heart of every human being. And who is willing to destroy a piece of his own heart?”
3: fire and cloud – Exodus 13:21 describes God leading the Israelites through a pillar of cloud by day and a pillar of fire by night.
4: serpent-sceptered priest – the famous story in Numbers 21:4-9 of the Israelites getting bitten by venomous snakes and healed by looking at the bronze serpent on a pole that God told Moses to make. Both First Nephi (1 Nephi 17:41) and Third Nephi (Helaman 8:13-15) use this story in their preaching.
5-6: broke and crushed himself in that dark room / and garden – the sacrament emblems—broken bread and wine made from crushed grapes—represent the Last Supper and Jesus’s suffering in Gethsemane and Golgotha.
6-7: who with bruised heel tread upon / the crown: the traditional image, referenced in the sacrament hymn “How Great the Wisdom and the Love,” is of Jesus crushing Satan’s head with a bruised heel. Part of how he did so is in rejecting the temptations in the wilderness, including earthly sovereignty (Matthew 4:9).
7: shouldered exile - an image that combines the physical reality of Jesus carrying his crossbeam with the concept of the sin-laden scapegoat being exiled from the community (Leviticus 16:10).
9: from the tomb – I’m going for a symbolic image instead of the more literal sunrise breaking “into” the tomb.
10: gnashing teeth and hallelujahs drawn – see note for line 2 above. “Gnashing of teeth” is what Jesus describes wicked people in their state of condemnation (Matthew 13:42)
11: every mouth unwound of shroud – the universal resurrection.
12: lightening from the east – wordplay welcoming the Second Coming as described by Jesus in Matthew 24:27: “For as the lightning cometh out of the east, and shineth even unto the west; so shall also the coming of the Son of man be.”
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