Tom Bailey

Lazarus’s Found Poem

after John 11:35

Jesus wept
Now Jesus wept
Then Jesus wept
Jesus shed tears
And the tears of Jesus came
Jesus began to cry
And the eyes of Jesus overcame
Yeshua cried
Jesus cried 
And crying is Jesus
Jesus wept
And Jesus himself was weeping
Jesus gave way to tears
Jesus began to weep

Lazarus’s List

Sometimes Lazarus makes lists of everyone who is dead. 
Mary is dead. Martha is dead. 
His old friend Simon the Leper is dead

Thomas is dead and his doubt 
is dead with him. Stars die and the darknesses 
between them also die. 

 Meanwhile Lazarus lives forever.
Meanwhile thoughts move 
like chess-pieces in different directions inside him.  

Lazarus’s Autobiography

Lazarus is working on an autobiography.
He thought some people might be interested in it, 

but it’s hard to know what to include
from the last two thousand years. Loads has happened.

 Wars, plagues, wildfires, for example. Love also. 
There are several common misconceptions

Lazarus hopes he can address, 
like the story about being put in a boat and 

 ending up in the south of France 
with his sisters Mary and Martha: not true. 

It’s taking a long time because his life is like a cupboard. 
He has to open the door and peer inside it.   

Next he is planning a monograph on Nietzsche. 
His agent says it has BSP, which means best-seller potential.

Lazarus’s Poems

Lazarus has written many poems.
Short lyrics mostly because narrative perturbs him.  

He has one poem called ‘Rhododendrons’ 
which is not about rhododendrons 

he just likes the sound of the word. 
It sounds like an engine starting up, he says,

like a car driving into someone else’s life. 
He likes the word ‘basilica’ too, but he can’t explain why. 

In the margins of Lazarus’s poems are 
his own red comments. 

THIS WHOLE STANZA IS STUPID, one of them says.
Eternity is like a big open plain

 When Lazarus looks at it. 
It’s actually very difficult to deal with. 

Tom Bailey is a poet, editor and support worker based in Edinburgh. His debut pamphlet of poems, Please Do Not Touch or Feed the Horses, won an Eric Gregory Award in 2025 and a Somerset Maugham Award in 2026. He edits the online magazine And Other Poems.

What our Featured Poet Tom had to say about his poems:

 Here’s what happened: my book about loss turned into a book about resurrection, and my book about resurrection turned into a book about Lazarus – the man brought back to life in Chapter 11 of the Gospel of John. There are lots of apocryphal accounts of what happens to Lazarus after the resurrection. In some versions, Lazarus ends up going to Cyprus and becoming Bishop of Kition, and finally dies after thirty more years of life. In another, he washes up in the south of France with his two sisters. In my version, Lazarus is brought back to life and then has to go on living forever, because nobody is allowed to die twice. One death each: that’s the rule. But it turns out eternity is actually quite difficult to deal with. It never ends. 

In John 11, Jesus is told that his friend Lazarus is sick. In fact Lazarus is referred to as ‘the one you love’, as in ‘Lord, the one you love is sick.’ I’m not religious myself, but I’ve always loved this story. I like that all we really know about Lazarus is that Jesus loved him. But what’s strange is that Jesus chooses not to intervene. In fact he lets Lazarus die, and only then does he travel to Bethany. He does this because curing a sick man is a lesser miracle than raising a dead one. I’m glad I wasn’t there, says Jesus. I doubt I’m the only person who finds this cruel. 

 When Jesus arrives in Bethany, Lazarus’s sisters Mary and Martha both confront him with the same accusation: ‘Lord, if you had been here, my brother would not have died.’ Jesus is ‘deeply moved in spirit and troubled’ to see the extent of their grief; it is seeing how Mary and Martha grieve for their brother that makes Jesus himself weep. Mary and Martha, of course, don’t know what is about to happen. They believe that death is death, and that is that.

Lazarus doesn’t speak in the Lazarus story. In fact he doesn’t say a single word in the whole Bible. The poet Elizabeth Jennings picks up on this in her own Lazarus poems. In ‘Lazarus Again’, Lazarus’s silence expresses the impossibility of articulating ‘What after-death can yield and mean and show’. There is, the poem says, ‘no metaphor’. I like the idea that the Lazarus story takes us to the edge of metaphor, perhaps to the edge of poetry itself: a man dies and comes back and doesn’t tell us a single thing about the experience. Lazarus’s silence makes him a sort of blank space in the Biblical narrative. We can pour our ideas into him, can make him mean whatever we want him to mean. I guess that’s what my Lazarus poems do. In my telling of the post-resurrection story, Lazarus is bored of life and even more bored of himself. He writes poems sometimes. He goes to art galleries every so often. He falls in love, though love – as you can imagine – is hard on him. He knows he has to outlive everyone he meets.

Someone asked me once if I ‘believed’ the Lazarus story. I don’t know what it would mean to say yes, or no.