For over 20 years, Jim Perkinson has been riffing on lectionary selections in spoken word mode and often presenting the same at worship services of St. Peter’s Episcopal Church just outside downtown Detroit. This is the third in a series of collaborations between Jim and Tim Nafziger putting this poetry in video form with text below.
the second coming of easter (I Corinthians 15)
jim perkinson
4-12-20
empty churches preaching empty tombs
to empty pews, a vision of gloom,
the doom of the poor now creeping close
in corona-spoor knocking even at the door
of the rich and who would have thought
it all could upend in a single dash of air-splash, invisible, carrying not quite living code
from animal to our abode everywhere,
leading all but rash, bible-brash evangelical hubris
to hunker in shelter, or fear-trembled,
in hovels or dense-packed streets
of homeless retreats or refugee tents
a world of babel towers and fake news showers
and glowering, bulge-veined purveyors of cover
for the bankers and oil exec wankers to push profit-margins to the edge of the cliff . . .