Magdalene’s mistake

“They have taken away my lord . . . and I don’t know
  where they have put him.” —John 20:13

She knew these things: a body doesn’t walk.
Soldiers can’t be trusted. Gossips will talk.

She made her way there in the early dark.
She knew the stories—Noah and the Ark,

Jonah and the whale, David and the stone,
the things a man can accomplish alone.

Even so, she couldn’t quite conceive
how a dead god could just up and leave

his beloveds behind, stricken with grief.
The empty days and nights, however brief,

reminding them of what they’d left behind—
death without rising for all of their kind.

She watched day dawn. Saw the budged rock.
Wept for all the bodies that would never walk.