Easter Saturday is a waiting day,
Waiting for the passage of time,
Between death and burial,
And resurrection.
I feel it at the pit of my stomach,
A waiting game.
I’m sitting underneath a grey and white sky,
A low covering.
An invisible breath right next to my ear whispers to me
To get up, get outside and jump into the slipstream.
But I won’t go.
Easter Saturday is a day of waiting,
And of living in several times all at once
Of existing in parallel.
Easter Saturday a long time ago, it seems like yesterday,
I’m smaller, younger, holding someone’s hand,
Walking along in the snow.
I’ve been given roller skates for my birthday,
Attempting to use them, despite the weather.
Roller skates and snow,
And one beloved hand.
A last day in a job the day before Easter weekend,
I get up to leave,
And everybody walks out of that door with me.
So many people that we fill a restaurant,
We eat then it becomes salsa paradise,
Salsa paradise in Hammersmith tube station.
I still see myself in that bar, dancing the night away,
It’s my birthday that day too, I recall.
In my imagination,
I’m dancing the night away in that bar forever more.
Rewind again,
I’m in an East Germany city,
I’m far away from home, turning twenty.
This part of my memory is dim and uncertain,
Even though I know full well what it wants to reveal.
I see my younger self looking out from the tenth floor of my student flat,
At a smoke blackened sky, wondering how to survive it.
I walk to the lift with new acquaintances,
Ready to drink German beer without the people I love,
But then, another precipice:
The lift doors open and something awaits me,
German beer and a whole new meaning.
A part of me still drinks in that East German city,
Dreams of it, sees it over and over
Sometimes in a waking twilight, somewhat unresolved.
Easter Saturday bathed in sun,
That must have been Italy.
Chasing children around in someone’s garden,
Trying to refuse food,
Throughout a carefree afternoon.
Kisses and boiled eggs,
Barbequed sausages, handmade pasta,
And the ever present Italian sunshine,
Always hope of new beginnings in those days.
Rewind to my teens and Easter is all outdoor concerts,
First forays down to Wembley Arena on the train:
The Cure, INXS, Duran Duran. I’m sixteen!
I can still see Michael Hutchane (God rest his soul),
Jumping into eternity,
Infecting the Arena with a life force so powerful,
Energy so tangible, so infectious that we are all electrified.
But they say that the dead can’t dance? Really?
Because a part of me still feeds off that energy,
That single day, that one man, now long gone.
Easter Saturday 1971,
Daffodils come out with the sun.
My mother, alone in a hospital,
Gives birth to a baby girl:
Me.
