Ninth Voice of the Garden for this April morning

There is a morning, each year, when something in the air changes.
We do not yet know why.

We open our eyes.
The light has a different colour.

As though the world had wept in the night and woken changed.

A bird sings.
Not to be heard.
Simply because it cannot do otherwise.

It is Easter.

At dawn, a woman walks through a garden toward a tomb.
She comes to go on loving the one she has lost.

She has nothing left.
Nothing but this path, the stones beneath her feet, and the grief she carries as one carries someone they refuse to let go.

She expects to find the stone.
The silence.
The terrible order of things.

But the stone has been rolled away.
The tomb is open.

There is nothing left to hold on to, nothing she can still carry.

 

She weeps.
Standing.

In this garden, which continues to exist without returning what she came to find.

And it is there, at the very place where everything has given way, that a voice speaks her name.

Just her name.
No explanation.
No promise.
No speech.

As though that name, in that voice, still held all the love she believed buried.

In The Garden of the Worlds, this morning, the trees are in bloom.

They know nothing of all this.

After the cold, after the bare branches winter had left as though lifeless, they open.

Without a sound.
Without explanation.

Life returns.
It always returns.

And when it returns, it never comes alone.

It comes toward someone.
It speaks a name.

Perhaps yours.

Happy Easter.

Eric Domb