RECALLED

Most people are familiar with the name of Lazarus, whose reanimation features as the last of the miracles ascribed to Jesus in the Gospel of John. 

Lazarus, already dead and entombed, was commanded to return to life and duly rose in his winding sheets and rejoined his family. 

We assume he was overjoyed with this turn of events.

But was he? 

LAZARUS REGRETS

I suppose I should be grateful

that I have been restored to life.

Truly a miracle, they say,

for I was dead, my youthful wife

a widow. Then came that fateful

moment: the voice, to my dismay,  

of God, or something like His voice

recalled me from that peaceful place,

a still, enshrouding nothingness

where I was free in endless space.

I sat up, watched my wife rejoice,

enfold me in her warm caress,

and back came flooding all the cares,

the daily desolation, fears,

unspooling like a ball of thread.

My neighbours wondered at my tears

and crowded round me unawares. 

A kind God would have left me dead.

In death, I had at last escaped

the terror, that each human knows,

of his inevitable doom.  

A feather underneath my nose

proved me extinct. My coffin, draped

with sackcloth, waited by the tomb.

Then came a Man, a God of sorts,

whose word alone awakened me,

my winding sheets fell off, my eyes

perceived, at first, a wondrous tree,

then children carrying reports

of miracles with joyous cries.

I, through this sudden jubilation, wept

for that lost, lovely place wherein I slept.