Caitlin Smith Gilson

Of Ancient Oracles: From Good Friday to the Harrowing (Holy Saturday) 

This is an excerpt from the forthcoming collection Luminous Darkness: The Passion of the Last Words, forthcoming in Spring 2025

My soul is stoned in silence 

I know and it is done  

So terribly unhappy and more terribly alone 

Not long ago 

You were thrust on your sword and your larkspurs grew 

Prussian blue delphinium, and each an unbranched stalk . . .   

Not long ago 

I was knit together in my mother’s womb, unhidden from you 

Made in secret place 

You know full well the depths of the mantle 

Vandal of metamorphoses and sorrow 

These leaves are three toothed lobes in palmate shape 

And you 

Once oceanic and free 

Divinity of risen and fallen sea 

All salt robed in green beyond Thebes 

When the son is the father, and the father is the son 

There were such things 

Now these roots go lower than the flower 

Descending sleep and never wake 

This body has no counterweight 

Save me O God, the waters have come in, even unto my Soul 

Pinned white bird coo for me 

With feather tips trimmed in silver 

Caladrius of little death and ecstasies 

The caves have their own arteries  

Carved long before I was born  

Threefold dove on shorn winter’s cliff 

Will you look into my face pinned as you are 

I cannot see, filled with shame 

I never knew how to be 

Where are the roots of the flowering tree 

If only your gaze would come again 

So that I may live and die and live without sin 

Not long ago 

You were thrust on your sword and your larkspurs grew 

Prussian blue delphinium, and each an unbranched stalk . . . 

Your Cross is staked earth 

Marsyas in agony 

Shoulder wrought in ivory 

You are the lost child encased in burnt clay 

How will you ever see the day 

Numberless Eurydices skinned by the sun 

Deadheaded bud below the earth 

Chthonic offering of you and you 

Confusion of myth and dream and you 

How can you save me, pallid delphinium 

Inflorescence among the weed 

Acheron’s waters you feed 

Save me, O God, I have drifted into deep waters, where the flood engulfs me 

This embankment must erode 

The twofold door below 

Cardea’s hinges rattling but I cannot get through 

There is no verb, the word is soundless fear 

Marching on hollowed marrow  

Too near too near too near to run 

Splintered knee turned inside out 

Cup of my bone and stoned silence 

Wormwood tear 

I know and it is done  

Too near to near too near to run 

Plummeting from cypress  

Woven from knitted rope 

So terribly unhappy and more alone 

Red ruined delphinium 

Too near to near too near to run 

Caitlin Smith Gilson is Professor of Philosophy at St. Vincent de Paul Regional Seminary. She is the author of a number of books on theology, Christian philosophy, and poetry, most recently, All This and Heaven Too: A Guide for All Souls and The Impossible Possibility: Christ and the Problems of Forgiveness.