The Conspiracy

It seemed we were cornered, a cosmic conspiracy,

Our life and our longing aligned against us

With the dread of death, our desire for justice

And the friend who forgives, forgives all

Though understanding everything, each other’s tearing,

Our mood and our might mocked by our ending.

“We did not beg birth, bawling at heaven,

Nor the debt we bear, desire buying

Fractured fulfilment, and at last futility.

We are numb in our need, knowing it unmet

And to ache forever. Oh that you had made us

As the unperceiving stones, unfeeling sea,

The semblance in the stars of far, freezing serenity.”

Thus we acted the innocent.

    Until the ringleader

(As we dared say) defected to our side,

Assumed mortality like man that is made.

He sustained the weary, stole the sting

From grief’s wounds with a gentle word.

Peace and healing were his practice,

Rage too at wrong that wrecks us.

Vain and unvalued was our show of virtue,

Our Babel laid bare to his brightness.

Wan then the welcome to light that enlightens.

We cursed him and crushed him, hurried him to his cross,

There taught him tortures unimagined by innocence.

Yet he pleaded for our pardon in his fierce passion.

Warring on our wickedness, he dragged it to death,

Laid it in the lees of hell at his release.

Yet his death was reckoned as writing off our debt:

We cannot claim clean hands, pure hearts,

Except by the sign of our sin against Christ.

To baulk at his blood is guilt against us.

Insisting on innocence implicates in his murder…

Rightly could he laugh at our lacrimae rerum.

Our pose is proven, we are found out.

Yet he considers the chief hurt of his cross:

Forsaken. He would spare us confusion…