Tower and Town, May 2015 (view the full edition)A Poem For EasterA Poem for Easter by David Du Croz 1984 I heard a man was shot in Crossmaglen, and saw my baby daughter die in bed. I felt the shattered devastation of gun-shot shell-shocked cities. I heard the cries of hungry children, and saw the bitterness of loveless faces. And every time I saw my Lord climb with a heavy heart back up onto his cross again. I felt the nails and spear and heard the mercy cry, and saw Him carry off the pain and hurt, healed with a kiss of peace. I wrote this poem in 1984 at a time when the news, not unlike much of what we read today, was full of stories of torment and conflict. The Irish Troubles were in full swing; the Lebanese civil war was tearing parts of the Middle East apart; famine in Africa was providing haunting pictures of starving children ("Do they know it's Christmas?" was to top the charts at the end of the year). As a family we had suffered our own tragedy when our baby daughter Sophie had died of cancer two years earlier at the age of three. It was a time when one could be forgiven for beginning to wonder if there was a loving God at all in the midst of all this pain, and there were times when my faith was wearing very thin. Easter with its message of resurrection offered hope, but a hope that could only be reached through the suffering of Good Friday - for some the image of Easter is the empty tomb, but for me it is still the cross. I was reminded that there are no depths of human misery that Jesus through his Passion had not experienced, and in the poem I was trying to find a way of expressing how the crucifixion somehow was His way of taking on himself that whole burden of our hurt, and releasing us for the joy of the resurrection. As Isaiah says, "surely he hath borne our griefs and carried our sorrows." Christ's supreme sacrifice on the cross was and is every day His ultimate gift of love to us all. David Du Croz, 2015 |