Selected poems
The undoubting Thomas
The apocryphal text, 'The Passing of Mary', assigns an important role to Thomas. Painters have also been drawn to its final ascension scene.
I was the Torah vowel, missing until body sang breath
into the canticle, while Magdalene was banished
from skin.
~
The Lord returned again, this time
to the olive-mount where the feastday beacons
once burned, to prise His mother gently from this life
as He had promised, and bind me to a second absence,
as if I had slipped India's knot into a void momentarily
beyond His reach.
Those of the twelve who remained
saw Him rise into the air as sure as morning.
He spread his arms to the widths of the universe:
all matter merged in His being and all time
compressed into a single moment; their flesh
turned a burnished copper, their eyes milk-blind.
When He withdrew his wingspan to the present
and their senses righted, they noticed Mary
at His side, the near-death gauntness of her face
ceded to a dandelion-halo, her body a cicada shell
on the ground where she had stood among them.
They feared desecration, so hid her corpse
in an unmarked tomb.
I had been preaching
to the vaunted and downtrodden alike. Two
comely young royals sought me out, from a thirst
for the exotic or rebellion, or because love at first
is a stranger. I espoused true marriage as one to faith,
the body a vessel for acts of worship, not desire.
I closed my eyes to draw new thought. When
I reopened them an empty stone slab lay before me
in a cavern rough-hollowed but flooded with a light
that had penetrated its roof. Mary hovered
in the light, as a gull is both sea and air, in a flowing robe,
her outstretched hand bearing the cincture I would need
to recount the mystery to the others.
~
What succour then
for my own mother, her son lost to the rapture
of a new covenant, who pitied the belief she had birthed
in him as unrequited and trailed a black sail
into a wilderness he never left?
A death in India
'The Acts of Thomas' records Thomas' death in India by the spears of the soldiers of King Misdaeus.
The kingdom I foretold, greater than his, his edicts
chatter, riches valued as lint, that even to lie
on the marital bed was to court idolatry
of the senses, the succession at risk: thus the guards
marched me into the hills.
An allotted task: no cruciform
pattern, no declension of wounds according to offence,
a simple frenzy of blows to shorten the time required
to execute the order, then a trench-grave below where
I gurgled past life, but deep enough to deny even the jackals
a ragged eucharist.
~
Years later, Misdaeus' youngest son
fell ill, his skin had begun to colour and rive like feldspar,
his breath hinted of char and saltpetre. The king's physicians
could offer only shadowless comfort. His mind cast back
to my time among his people, how the sick had prayed
to me, despite my chiding. He directed his soldiers to exhume
my body, to touch my skeletal hand upon his son's head,
unaware the dirt retained only memory of me.
When he found me absent, he swathed his son's neck
in a necklace of the empty dust.
~
My first grave, Madras, then Edessa, Ortona:
disinterments and transits, at the last an index finger
displayed as if a Communion host in a monstrance-
quarrel still marks my name!
I am not John
The Gospel of John mentions the 'disciple whom Jesus loved' in many places but does not identify him nor her. This disciple has received much exegetical attention over the years. Schenke has suggested Thomas as the model for the Beloved Disciple. Charlesworth goes so far to identify him as Thomas.
I've seen them, even from this remove, scour the catacombs
like stoats, pore over the bone piles, sniff the possibility
of a random trochanter matching the fragment of femur
they hold before them, then resort to the lathe to sculpt
the long shafts that will advance their arguments.
It has not been given me to know whether John wrote
the gospel that makes us beg his name, whether it was
in Patmos, as they say, nursing the oil scalds that preceded
his exile, that he absorbed the Koine script of the text
(not the Aramaic we spoke) and where the brief spells
he could endure outside the cavern-made-hermit-cell
as he healed transformed light into the ecstasy he injected
into his memory of the Saviour. Even less do I know
of the beloved disciple who slouched on Christ's shoulder
as we ate that last night, who stood and bartered fame for care
of His mother as He mouldered on the bloody cross.
Three days later the doe-eyed one immediately discerned
the portent - after Magdalene's alert - of the bare crypt
but neglected to convey its import to us. And I was cast
as a termite drunk on the necessity of wood! But still
I was the first to proclaim the words that became
our creed: we seek for the eternal whorl that will gather
us into the sacred thread, so that we are all loved,
there is no need for a Thomas, nor for a John.
Paul Scully is a Sydney-based with yeo published collections, An Existential Grammar and Suture Lines. The first was shortlisted for the Anne Elder Award. His work has appeared in print and online journals in Australia, the UK and USA.