Three O’Clock

“Three O’Clock”

(in the afternoon)

(“At three o’clock, Jesus groaned out of the depths, crying, loudly,... My God, my God, why have you abandoned me?” Mark 15:34)

You touched the outer edge of darkness,

the banks where no one dares go, where

light has been torn from the sky and left dangling

in its frayed socket

You went where hidden hearts desperately seek

silence, only to find a million radio waves

broadcasting nonsense and fantasies...you went

where noise is loneliness

You pitched your tent on intention’s hill where

great campaigns of the mind were conceived

hoping sunrise would prove the rightness of the cause,

but sunrise never came

You embraced the panic of the child fallen in a pit

whose echoeless cries are muffled across the empty sky,

no one hears

You dove into our disappointments, drank our despair,

breathed our obscurity while we watched

and laughed

that a Messiah could doubt at all

Every weak and wicked doubt flew toward You

like light swallowed by a black hole till they were

destroyed by the sheer gravity of Your soul

So you cried the cry of everyman’s doubt,

felt the anguish of allwoman’s fear,

saturated Yourself with our sin and knew me like

You never could before.

So I find You there at the outer banks where

no one goes and

am not alone

this poem © 1999 by mark phillips, all rights reserved