Welcome back to The Daily Poem here on the Close Freeds Podcast Network. I'm David Kern.

Today's poem is by John Upteke. He lived from 1932 to 2009 and is perhaps best known as a novelist and short storywriter and a literary critic.

He's one of only three writers to win the Pulitzer Prize more than once.

Sadden out, the others were Booth Tarkington and William Faulkner.

So while he is perhaps best known as a novelist,

including his most famous work, which is the Rabbit series,

the novels Rabbit Run, Rabbit Redux, and Rabbit is Rich, and so forth.

Today I'm going to read a poem that he wrote, and it is called Seven Stanzas at Easter.

I have a couple of Easter poems for you for the next couple days. This is how it goes.

Make no mistake, if he rose at all it was as his body.

If the cell's dissolution did not reverse, the molecules re-knit, the amino acids rekindle.

The church will fall.

It was not as the flowers, each soft spring recurrent.

It was not as his spirit in the mouths and fuddled eyes of the eleven apostles.

It was as his flesh.

Hours.

The same hinged thumbs and toes, the same valved heart,

that pierced died, withered, paused,

and then regathered out of enduring might, new strength to enclose.

Let us not mock God with metaphor, analogy, sidestepping, transcendence.

Making of the event a parable, a sign painted in the faded credulity of earlier ages.

Let us walk through the door.

...