translated by Willis Barnstone

Christ on the cross. His feet touch the earth.

The three beams are the same height.

Christ is not in the middle.  He’s the third one.

His black beard hangs over his chest.

His face is not the face of engravings.

He is harsh and Jewish. I don’t see him

and will go on seeking him until the last

day of my steps on the earth.

The broken man suffers and is quiet.

The crown of thorns cuts him.

He is not reached by jeers of the mob

which has seen his agony so many times.

His or another’s. It’s all the same.

Christ on the cross. Confusedly

he thinks of the realm that maybe awaits him,

thinks of a woman who is not his.

It’s not given to him to see the theology,

the indecipherable Trinity, the Gnostics,

the cathedrals, Occam’s knife,

the purple, the miter, the liturgy,

the conversion of Guthrum by the sword,

the Inquisition, the blood of the martyrs,

the atrocious Crusades, Joan of Arc,

the Vatican that blesses armies.

He knows that he is not a god and is a man

who dies with the day. It doesn’t bother him.

What bothers him is the hard iron of the nails.

He’s not a Roman. He’s not a Greek. He moans.

He has left us splendid metaphors

and a doctrine of pardon that can

annul the past. (That sentence

an Irishman wrote in a jail.)

the soul seeks its end, hurriedly.

It’s darkened a bit. Now he is dead.

A fly walks quietly across the flesh.

What good does it do me that that man

has suffered, when I suffer now?