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[after Song Of Solomon 1:7]

You called me off the boats on Galilee,

and from my father's business, fishery.

I was the youngest son of Zebedee,

thirteen years old and far too awkwardly

shy:  and often the long cascades of my hair

drew from a passing thug crude mockery

that drove me, in my early adolescence,

into the dark fogs of teenaged despair----

more lingering than lake-mist's effervescence.

But, in the shelter of your company

I felt my spirit---even mine---bloom fully,

and thrive under the sunshine of Love's joy.

Now, evil men---possessed by spiritual strife;

gleeful tools of the Devil and of Death---

have been allowed, by You, Yourself, to bully

You into the profoundest agony;

subjecting Your flesh to gross mutilation

so horribly inflicted, so extreme,

that I could not suppress my soul's loud scream

(some said I was no man yet, just a boy---

even though I can claim, now, sixteen years;

yet could not quite conceal my anguished wails,

or hold back the profusion of hot tears).

The weight of suffering crushed Your last breath

from You as You sunk on that bloody cross,

suspended---and fixed there---by Roman nails.

I helped Joseph and Nicodemus put

Your body on the slab in that new tomb.

We closed the door upon You in that gloom

and chill.  Upon us all the most profound

and hard burden of unrelenting loss

perched now.  Y ou asked me to care for your mother,

but I did not want to live one more day

(nor spend the rest of this one, or another)

in this forsaken world where you were slain.

And, as I pondered this a little while,

I seemed to feel a sense of your wry smile

(the beauty of which no words can convey

and no books, few or many, can contain):

and of your whisper that this holy ground---

that Your living presence had made so sacred---

could not be, thence, defiled by their wild hatred:

and proof of that?  I stand here---still barefoot.

J-Called

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