Mandeville, La - by James Matthew Wilson, On The Mike Church Show A Dramatic Reading.
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The Stations of the Cross
by James Matthew Wilson, with artwork by Daniel Mitsui
A fourteen-part cycle published serially with accompanying iconography.
I. Jesus Is Condemned
I tried to think for half an hour
About the face of earthly powers
That would condemn a god to die.
I listened for its menacing cackles,
The crack of whips, the clank of shackles,
And searched for dark flames in the eye.
Through the church window I heard shrieks
Of ambulances whose techniques
Help us to forget our wounds;
The certain hum of homeward motors,
A candidate’s rank appeal to voters,
In these its stare and voice I found.
For we sit kind, when comfort’s here,
But draw our weapons with our fears
Should we one pleasure be denied.
II. Jesus Takes His Cross
In every lifting of a phone
To a hot ear; in every moan
Rising from a disheveled bed,
In each unfolding of the paper,
To check his shares or learn who raped her,
In overhearing what lawyers said
Traveling between rail stations: our
Bodies strain for the weight you bore.
Oh, we would be weighed down instead.
III. Jesus Falls the First Time
There is a question scholars ask,
Or used to ask: given the cask
Of vital spirits that was Christ’s tomb,
Can our age speak of tragedy
Anymore? Or is comedy
The only plot left in the room?
Where Hector glowered at his shield,
Knowing that fate would never yield
Till ruin spread over the place he stood,
Now, the scene that follows a fall
Is an uplifting, after all:
Lazarus comes out and eats some food.
I’m sure you wondered much the same,
As your back opened up in pain
And sprawled beneath the blood-soaked wood.
IV. Jesus Meets His Mother
Her face seems calm, when he descries her
Dark mantle, and sees that her eyes are
Counting the strokes scored on his back,
Noting where woven thorns imprinted
Kingship on his brow, how rust-tinted
With damp the dust runs in his track.
He feels her kiss against his shut eye,
And tries to tell her he will not die.
She says she’ll see him through the race.
After all, she’s heard all his words;
Her heart received them undisturbed,
And undisturbed, now, her soft face.
But, the authorities speak with one accord:
That heart is pierced by seven swords
And bleeds for being so full of grace.
V. Simon Helps to Carry Jesus’ Cross