Slow Ceremony of Breaking Bread


As the mutilated Christ,
maimed survivor of the bloodhall's gauntlet
staggered, pulled his deathbeam up the dust-choked trail,
that massive timber deeply reeking
of the countless slain before him
with its thick and stinking layers of
their assorted bloods and skins,
as its splintery filthiness gouged grooves into the exposed bone
He willingly commingle-mixed his red with theirs,
His innocence joined with all those guilty deaths;
and thus the hoarse and rasp of this profanity
was further ground into his heart.
The routineness of such sentences of death had dulled our world,
becoming entertainment though this day, unknown to them
this live theater of tragedy played on an astral plain;
it stunned angelic hosts as Heaven gasped and fell,
spellbound not so much by horror at such fatal torture,
the criminal injustice or collective, toxic agonies
but to be caught blind-sided as
witness to the awkward birth
of devastating love.

Copyright (c) 2009 Gary Brown