The Three Days
by Lynn Michael Martin
From everlasting to everlasting does the soul cry forth:
Blessed be his name,
who crowns the earth with his footsteps,
and plants his banner in the sky.
The clouds are his dominion,
and when he speaks the ages break forth:
they are the parchment of his thought
and of the word that speaks all beings
and all that shall be.
It is he who sends the mists to water the earth;
who sends the night to wrap it in slumber.
When he poured out his blood upon the world,
like the green river which he has outpoured,
like the light that grows verdant with spring—
when he gave that which is taken,
the heart’s blood, and sweat like tears—
when of his silence there distilled words—
Then was he seen in all his glory,
and the veil rent from heaven to the earth.
He showed himself the arbiter,
the voice that speaks rivers,
and of his stillness the world was formed.
This is what I know, who stand in the rain,
under the mist and the sunless sky,
that the hope of the world lies in darkness,
that in his tears all things shall be.
Lynn Martin believes that the essence of the universe is joy, and that in poetry there should shine both the earth’s joy and a light from beyond the world.
Photography by Merlin Yoder