This is a piece I have written, originally for the christian festival of Good Friday.
I hope you enjoy the piece and the recording, even if it is not of your faith.
Click on the image to listen
The Cross
Rough hewn, now old and battered wood lies blood soaked and splintered,
punctured with holes and stained rotting sinew all foul stinking and sintered.
Thrown to the ground after being dragged stuttering up the final hill…
now a scourged arm is stretched, full length, a soldier’s grip holds it still.
The crowd simmers for the hammer that’s lifted for only the first of the cruel blows,
their cries ring out in cold, misplaced, blood lusted thirst, while the carrion crows…
watch square forged nails, their mangled tips glint, being once more sharpened,
but when that first blow is struck, the mood changes, now more real, more hard, more darkened.
No cry from the victim of this harsh, homicidal, capital, attack,
but his hand clenches, eyes roll and an arch rises along his back.
The nail drives through his fine skin, into bone right and down to the wood,
what worse fate can human lay on human, who honesty ever could…
imagine worse, but then the second arm is pinned and last, the dirt dusted feet….
crossed to receive pain while soldiers ranks sound a tattoo on their shields, a steady, steady beat.
Then it stops….. but still no victim’s word as the cross is hoisted up on high,
the only sound now from a mother, but only then a small and muffled cry…
for her son who had not been given long in this savage, unremitting world,
she could only watch as the pain showed now, through his fingers as they curled.
As if it wasn’t enough to contend with, during this vile humiliation,
one warder, feeling guilty, takes a small sponge soaked in a libation,
obnoxious and crude, the guilt’s compounded as he offers it up with a snigger,
spiced unkindly with molding sourness, in the form of rancid, acrid vinegar.
With the victim’s weight overcoming what little strength he might have left,
comes the first cry, not pain but pleading, it would leave him hanging, bereft,
‘Why forsake me my father’, comes the cold, heart wrenching exhortation,
‘Forgiveness for all men, please’, a last wish for our lives, his final act before total decimation.
Thunder cracks, his crowned head falls, thorn pricked bleeding now stopped,
lightening spears from the heavens and to the ground, the fearful onlookers dropped.
Dressed in her blue, a mother pleads for the shattered body of her boy,
not even with this travesty heaped upon her, could her love for him destroy.
The crowd wails loud, rent their cloths, shed cold tears but while accusations fly,
from the rank steps a lone soldier who claims, from this shameful act, he’s now their converted ally.
With the body borne away, laying empty, that simple, blooded, anonymous wooden cross…
just like our wider world, does not appreciate the consequence of its part in humanities cruel loss?
© David Rollason 2017