| Soldiers of the Cross
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Nails and wooden beams are holy things
That frame the shelters that we build
To shield us from hail and rain and cold
Ourselves, our children, and our faithful beasts.
But yesterday outside the city walls
I saw three people slowly killed
By soldiers driving nails through living flesh
Into a high crossbeam. Their officers, our priests
Had bid them do this horrid thing.
I noticed that their labor was far from skilled,
A desecration of the builder's art,
A frame thrown up as no good builder would,
Done with no love or thought of any good.
No twisted glee of pity in their eyes,
I thought they looked numb to what they did.
I doubt that this time was the first.
The orders came, they did as they were told.
If some poor wretch cried out, "I thirst,"
They might have offered a drink, no more than this.
For insubordination was the sin
They dreaded most. It's true since time began,
A soldier's nothing but a man
Who dares not be a man.
- Bob Engstrom-Heg
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| Good Friday
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It pulls at some deep corner
this scene of mother and child
holding battered child,
cradling a son become a worm.
The hair she had combed, blood-matted
the silken skin, gashed.
"What have you done to him?" turned to
"At least you can do no more."
Blackened nails, limp arms
willingly pinned, energy drained
from one who feared he could not do
enough,
all lost to the weariness of the long dying.
In crushed silence, we enter
the empty night of those
who murdered God, vowing we will
not add another splinter to that cross.
-- Kathy Coffey
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