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Hosanna, 4: Joseph's Garden
In Joseph's garden, where his servants put---
near the new sepulcher, in well-turned soil---
exotic seedlings that the Spring will flower:
two friends have come to spend a private hour.
Across the well mown grass, they walk, barefoot.
Outside the city's walls, and its turmoil.
they talk of adolescent love's rapt glow
that they had shared some eighteen years ago---
enjoying, chastely, such emotions' flow.
Deeper friendship enfolds them, with no loss
of that short summer's privileged memory:
shadowed by facts only one of them know
now---that, in the new tomb's dark recess, He
will be laid after dying on a cross.
