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Ian CrockattPoems |
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The Unforgiven
Ian Crockatt
Being Herod was impossible
that Christmas, swords going epileptic,
anoraks on bikes chasing stars.
I issued a thousand edicts - how else to face
the pyres of infants' limbs,
the news-readers' poker faces
simpering over shots of dazzled peasants,
old Bethlehem a talking-shop
of suspect close encounters, bud-eyed kings?
It was all too much - the responsibility,
the risk of failure, conspiracies of High Priests,
generals falling on swords.
In simpleton disguise I
visited the asylum to greet their
blue-cowled virgin - pure Mother-of-King.
"Time," she assured me, "for your trials to begin."
O and I was impaled on the spear-
points of their words, bloodily
deconstructed on tacky talk-shows,
monstered by history. "In the name
of the son," I begged, "drowning in mother's milk;
of the daughter seduced by angels; of the father
and of the wife- their infidelities;
in the name of our lip-serviced gods and misled peoples-
take this heart and feed it to the hungry;
embalm this brain for schoolboys to dissect;
let the stone that stops his tomb be my lost head."
They took me -you still take me- literally.
Every star-hyped Christmas you resurrect
that boy and crucify me.
