PostPoems Be Artistic. Be Creative. Be Inspired!

Suspended on a cross of Roman wood by

nails of Roman iron driven through your flesh,

you feel the energy of life withdrawing:  and

your soul, led---you know not (yet) how---to

withdraw from the sins you have accumulated

(though Barabbas committed the murders of
those you had robbed), you turn to the

innocent man next to you and ask only to be

remembered.  You are no sophist; you cannot

explain the paradox---that, fully a man, He is

more than a man; He is God and Man.  You,

being sinful and condemned to this ignomious

death, and a toss, when dead, into a ditch

outside the City's walls, where, by night, the

wild dogs, emboldened by the odor of death, will

maul, perhaps dismember, but certainly devour the

carcass that was once you, you turn to Him, Whom

priests and scribes---and your bitter compatriot---

mock and scorn; and, after rebuking your once

closest friend, you declare the innocence of the
Man who hangs next to you, and ask only to be

remembered.  And He, dying more rapidly than you,

promises you Paradise, in His Company, this

very day.  His Words echo again and again in your

soul, as if He, knowing your inherent uncertainty

(given the sordid sum total of your past and its sins),

intends to fill that lack of assurance with certainty.

Shortly, thereafter, the darkness begins; a nightfall

awaited since shortly after the world began, a nightfall

without moon and stars---these having, like the sun,

retreated to a veil, a screen, of unlit sorrow.  He will

die during the phase of this skyward shadow, and,

when the daylight returns, as it will, you also will

died as the soldiers of Rome break your legs with a

convenient board, and down you go at once---

asphixiating---that the Sabbath and the land

should not be defiled.  But in this gloom that has

gathered without a gloaming, a light shines in your

soul, a glowing of two sides---forgiveness of all your

sins, and the promise of Paradise in His company.  This

assuages even the fear of asphixiation preceded by the

agony of your legs shattered by the smashing blow of a

convenient board.  And, perhaps unknown to you, you

have repaid all that you stole; you have repaid it in

thousandsfold by thousandsfold when you asked to be

remembered by the Son of God, and received His

lasting, enduring, and wholly efficient promise---that you,

with all others who die in Faith upon His Words---will be

with Him in Paradise, in that Garden He had prepared at the

Will of His Father; a Garden, they say, surpassing even Eden.

Starward