Give municipal flesh
All the Christian blood it craves
Fill its government goblets and gutters,
Make them drunk at the uncontested slaughter,
Christian lambs taken with ceremonial knives,
By simpering tolerance, self-righteous love.
They hunger,
These counselors,
give them raw secular fantasies
To suck red marrow from,
These blind
to their own bigotry,
Let them dream their own glory,
Drooling blood
Upon the Golgotha of their silent slain.
Then open their eyes
When you come again
For an account of their lives;
If they repent,
And their anguish
Is as the anguish of your Son,
Forgive them.
Forgive them.
"Let them dream their own glory..."
ReplyDeleteBack to read this again. As I find with all your poems, there is an almost deceptive simplicity that I regard as quietly masterful. "Deceptive" because one is not aware of how immediately you are getting to the heart.
I also quite like the robust language of that first stanza!