Lessons with the Dead
Photo by Yoksel 🌿 Zok on Unsplash
A Poem by Elle Rosamilia
All winter long I was busy befriending Lazarus. We spent the mornings listening for Jesus’ voice and the evenings waiting for our eyes to adjust to the dark. We exchanged names and dreams and causes of death. He was a good tombmate, patient as a Thursday. He told me stories of his sisters, taught me the hide-and-seek games they used to play, showed me how to fold my grave clothes so I’d be ready when Jesus told us it was time to leave.
In April, I found myself walking through a different miracle. I left Bethany and traveled north to Capernaum to find the body of a dead little girl. I’m standing at her bedside and I’m hiding like a ghost in the hollow caverns of her lungs and I am once again straining my ear to hear Jesus’ voice, but this time when I open my eyes the world is not the black hole of Lazarus’s tomb. It’s white walls and windows flung open to let in light and street-songs rising like incense from below. It’s familiar faces still wet from tears but transfigured with disbelief. It’s a glass of cool water, it’s a piece of warm bread, it’s Jesus’ hand outstretched, helping me to stand.
I don’t know how long I have lived inside graves, resurrected but still waiting to walk back out into daylight. I don’t know why the scene I’ve made a home out of has shifted with the entrance of spring. I don’t know what Jairus’s daughter has to teach me, but I know the little girl inside my chest––the one I mourned as dead who keeps pressing on my sternum like a heartbeat to remind me that she’s here––is sitting up in bed, arm extended, her fingers inches away from Christ’s open hand.
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Elle Rosamilia grew up in the woodlands of upstate New York and moved to Mississippi for college, where she studied creative writing, teaching English as a second language, and intercultural studies. Since graduating, she has lived in multiple countries and is currently back in the States as she figures out her next steps. No matter where she goes in life, she can always be found pressing wildflowers, taking too many pictures of sunlight, and making art out of anything she can find.
