Lazarus, Waking Up Again
This is how each day begins. He opens his eyes
slowly. Tries to focus on details. The sky has a color
like that of poorly-dyed Easter eggs, blue the higher up
he looks, shell-white closer to the horizon.
The green shadow of a spruce cast over the snow
reminds him of a woman bending down
to sweep the floor. Every day, it’s as though
his sight has been renewed—spittle in dust, clay
pressed into his eyes. Healing through mud, as though
he himself was fashioned out of terra cotta,
like the soldiers of Qin. He was seven when
the doctor told him he couldn’t see. Without glasses,
small birds flying past his window look like seeds,
from which the world emerges, part by part,
and that seems right. He is caught in the middle
of a great threshing, buoyant, upborne, one
among a harvest of grains. But vision contradicts
his other senses. His stomach tells him something else:
“The catterpiller on the Leaf
Repeats to thee thy Mother’s grief.” (1)
Beneath the snow, the caterpillars are sleeping.
Like them, he has been eating shadows,
growing fat on darkness. The weight of blankets
on his skin tells him more. You don’t have a choice
when it comes to your body—
if it wants wings, they grow—when it’s ready
to die, you die. He read a study which explains
how a type of sea slug (2) decapitates itself
in order to grow a new body. Does the slug’s head
confront the murderer’s dilemma:
what to do with the corpse? Now consider
Lazarus, waking up again…Was it a miracle
like everyone said, or was it a disappointment?
He lay there for a moment rubbing his eyes,
then lifted himself up onto his elbows, looking down
at the same heavy set torso, the legs
with their swollen calves, his callused feet…
Why not something new?
—
1 William Blake, “Auguries of Innocence”
2 Elysia marginata
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William Welch lives in Utica, NY where he works as a registered nurse. His poetry has appeared or is forthcoming in Poetry South, Little Patuxent Review, Stone Canoe, and others, and is collected in Adding Saffron (Finishing Line Press, 2025). He edits Doubly Mad (doublymad.org). Find more on his website, williamfwelch.com.
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Stone Poetry Quarterly 