Seeing Jesus while on vacation in Greece by Nadine Ellsworth-Moran

What a broad world to roam in, what a sea to swim in is this God.

 A.W. Tozer

McCartney’s Hope of Deliverance sifts
through the noise at The Hippie Bar to make
its way over pool water splashing as he walks
toward me, not to me, but the water. He looks
how I imagine, jumps, and sinks

to blue tiles below. How long can Jesus
hold his breath? I wait to see him rise
and lean into the waterhold, float, eyes closed—
I think they were brown eyes. I wasn’t close
enough to be sure.

Did Jesus ever swim for the joy of it? Rise and stretch
at midnight to walk along the shore road alone, shedding
robe and sandals on the beach, stride onto the Galilee
of his own imagining, find a place in the middlesea to dive
where the fish school— slick silver finned to outline his body
with theirs, his craftsman’s body, sleek as their own,
sinewy and fluid as air.

Did he break the surface with a raucous shout unutterable
by another, a sound to plumb the night and echo back? Did
he love to float, eyes skyward, take in his moon and the stars
he whispers alive with light, marvel with them in solidarity
of their dying and rising with each turn of the planet,
his hair in an arcing dark halo around his unreproducible face?

I tell my friend, Jo, about the song and seeing “Jesus”
at the pool. She asks, well who was he?
I didn’t know him, I say, I think he was a guest.

Nadine Ellsworth-Moran lives in Georgia where she serves full time in ministry. She has a passion for writing and is fascinated by the stories of the modern South unfolding all around her as she seeks to bring everyone into conversation around a common table. Her essays and poems have appeared in Interpretation, Ekstasis, Thimble, Emrys, Structo, Kakalak, and Sonic Boom, among others.  She lives with her husband and four unrepentant cats.