Scenes from an Everlasting Life
My Easter poem for 2026
Happy Easter! I wish you and yours a blessed weekend as you remember and consider the life of Christ.
Each year I aim to write a poem to explore some what the life and death of Jesus means. Honestly, I was surprised with how this poem came to me this year and the form it took!
I was disrupted by an image of Christ climbing over bodies like the frozen dead on the pathway to Everest’s summit that we often hear about, people who didn’t make it to the top. But these bodies weren’t frozen or unmoving, not ascending either. They were tormented and miserable, bodies Christ stepped over on his descent unto hell.
Now you’re thinking, Gee, Andrew, try to stop selling me on this happy poem!
That was the inception point to this year’s Easter poem. My entry. A quick visit to theological foundations followed (Why do we say Christ “descended unto hell?”; What does 1 Peter 3 really cover?) and a stopover in the dazzling, frightening, magnificent pages of Revelation was next.
I don’t always find it easy to celebrate Easter. I feel so unprepared, so unworthy, too rushed. Even though the day looms for months, I resist walking through the emotion, the tragedy of this day of days.
How can I or anyone ever treat it properly? Must I really consider the cost, see the nail wounds, the scars and blood? I hate this day and I love it. How long should I linger in the punishing brutality of Good Friday? How quickly do I run to the empty tomb?
All of this while knowing it is finished and he is not there. For he is risen. And he is the eternal, resurrected Lord.
It’s a humbling, terrible, wondrous thing to contemplate, Easter.
So, if you approach Easter with resistance, fear, trembling, familiarity, unease, expectation, and hope, then you’re in good company.
I hope you enjoy this poem.
Note: if you're on your phone, turn it to horizontal (so the line breaks appear as they’re meant to appear).
Thanks for reading. And happy Easter. He is risen indeed.
~ AK
Scenes from an Everlasting Life
Easter 2026
On the eternal walls of the new Jerusalem, gold pure and clear as glass, between angel sentries with blazing swords and the twelve gates of iron a gallery of memories snatched out of eternity is set in frames that match the twelve foundations of the city’s walls, inlaid with every jewel–amethyst, emerald agate, sapphire. Their pictures tell the story of God’s people along its fifteen hundred miles. But toward the great hall of heaven, where future pilgrimage will have no tears no weeping on that long, inclined pathway toward the throne another gallery of photographs lines the crystal walls. Set in simple wooden frames cut from the trees of the nations these images tell the story of Heaven’s favourite Son. Scenes from his everlasting life hidden moments few on earth could see fixed forever along the golden walkway as the peoples, kings of the earth, walk through the gates, awed by the craftsmanship, stirred and quickened by memory. The wavecatcher whooping for joy as he climbed the swells of Galilee, robes soaked through as he hurdles the crest of a roller the whoop of joy lost in the wind, a lock of wet hair plastered against his cheek. The apprentice, hammer in hand brow wrinkled in concentration as he aligns two pieces of expensive cedar silhouette of his carpenter teacher out of focus in the background. The phenom, only twelve, surrounded by sages, men shrouded in robes alight with wisdom of the ages, jaws set determined to answer the questions of a young beardless Nazarene whose clear voice and probing questions have them all leaning in as though he pulls them with invisible string. The stories that would have filled the books that could have been written by disciples and apostles by women who faithfully followed and attended him the expectant and pushy throngs of people who peered over peers to catch a glimpse on windswept hills and stone porticos fill the frames on these walls. And then, at the end of that long hallway a single rectangle black like a thundercloud like a burned and bombed out village. The three long days when every lens, eye every heart turned its gaze and what took place could not be captured or described, only imagined as Christ stepped over horrors and terrors, like so many bodies lining the frozen ascent on the world's highest peak, only these burned with rage and fear, alive and agonized on the descent to hell where absence of goodness even a single smudge or waft was complete. After this, a final frame not on a wall but at the end of the hallway, like a doorway that each person alone must step through carved out of rock, mounts stained red, so narrow nothing but a body can get through. As the beholder steps across the threshold what they see, if they can catch a glimpse before they fall down as though dead, more alive than they’ve ever been will come in a flash, in snapshots: the blood-dipped hem of the finest linen; eyes that flame like fire; diadems shining from a crown no other shoulders could bear. The crucified, eternal the risen Lord.



Beautiful!
Christ is risen!