As It Rises

As It Rises

Leonard Yip

after Matthew 27:46

These fallow days I’ve been learning to let the harrowing just happen. 
It’s enough for me to know, as the loneliness finds me again curled like a dog 

by the bed and cursing His name, that you muttered as much to His face while 
you hung from a dead tree, riven and ruined to the bone. 

What I mean to say is: I no longer need to know why the griefs happen, 
the derelictions. It’s enough that they echo 

up the aching arc of the years, that the why was yours to begin with, 
whimpered as the ones you loved left you in their droves. 

I imagine then, something the texts don’t record: you, graced with thorns, 
straining your neck away from the sea-grey clouds racing 

unto a violently distant heaven, watching instead for the crocus seeds 
planted the summer before. How they lie, dormant, 

in the dark before the rising, patient as in your own image - 
waiting for the softness of daylight when the stone, at last, 

                                                                                                                                  rolls away.

---

Leonard Yip
Writer

Leonard is a writer of landscape, people, nature and faith, and the places where these intersect. He recently graduated with an MPhil in Modern and Contemporary Literature from the University of Cambridge, and lives in Singapore, where he is currently furthering his work on terrains of the Anthropocene.

Photography by Zetong Li