"Talitha, cumi" is in the Bible, Mark 5:41. Jesus spoke this when He raised Jairus’s daughter from the dead.

 Note: I post this poem by John Updike every year on the date of Elvis's passing. When I read it in The New Yorker in December, 1999, we were getting ready for the Y2K nonsense, fearing that our computers and water pipes and elevators and clocks were all going to stop at midnight on New Year's Eve. Even so, the words and imagery moved me, then as now.

January 1, 2000 came in as scheduled. We simple believers got up and went to work, still believing in The King. I still do.

From The New Yorker, December 6, 1999

 

JESUS AND ELVIS



Twenty years after the death, St. Paul

was sending the first of his epistles,

and bits of myth or faithful memory -

multitudes fed on scraps, the dead small girl

told "Talitha, cumi" - were self-assembling

as proto-Gospels.  Twenty years since pills

and chiliburgers did another in,

they gather at Graceland, the simple believers,

the turnpike pilgrims from the sere Midwest,

mother and daughter bleached to look alike,

Marys and Lazaruses, you and me,

brains riddled with song, with hand-tinted visions

of a lovely young man, reckless and cool

as a lily.  He lives. We live. He lives.



                                           John Updike