Epektasis

The church teaches us again
how a year is completed.
Not by shouting at time
but by standing upright within it.

The doors close softly.
Wax thins to a final tear.
Incense learns the discipline of air
and withdraws without complaint.

The cave is still warm.
Not from wings—
the angels have folded their errands
and gone back into silence—
but from breath,
from the human labor of breathing God.

Straw has memorized the curve of a body.
Stone has learned tenderness.
Even the darkness has been instructed
how to cradle light
without breaking it.

What was spoken there
does not scatter.
The air keeps it,
as the sea keeps a name
long after the mouth that named it
has gone under.

Christ does not flee the calendar.
He does not vanish
when the bells loosen their grip
on the morning.

Outside, the world resumes its arithmetic:
markets inhale,
roads rehearse their impatience,
numbers shed one skin
and put on another.

Yet something remains
unaccounted for—
a surplus that refuses to be spent.

Light has entered time
and learned to wait.
It does not blind.
It abides.

Joy has accepted duration,
has put on the slow garment of days.
Hope has weight now—
you can feel it in the hands,
like bread still warm
from an unseen oven.

Nothing is erased.
The year does not empty itself—
it leans forward,
as a body leans into prayer,
held by what it cannot see
but trusts.

God stays.

Not as nostalgia.
Not as a fading echo
caught in the rafters of memory.

But as Presence—
measured, bodily,
dwelling among hours not yet baptized,
among mornings whose names
have not been spoken.

The feast withdraws its sound,
as the sea withdraws its foam,
leaving the shore altered,
whiter,
aware.

The Child remains.

And the world,
astonished but continuing,
must now learn
how to live
with God still here.