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Gethsemane
We had to do it, that’s what I keep telling myself.
The man wore his blasphemies like a wedding gown,
And Moses’ Law is death to any he that utters them.
Yet, night after night, the dream continues to wake me…
Red. Warmer than the Passover wine
That warmed it for tonight’s work,
Gushing into my hands, my hair,
A drop or two searing my tongue—
It tastes like copper.
I know this smell, from the Temple sacrifices,
As a pungency punctuating the animals’ squeals.
But I cannot hear them now,
Can see nothing but red and red and red,
And the appendage like a dried apricot slice at my feet,
Dipped in pomegranate paste, a cleanly severed thing.
Apparitions thrash in the haze:
A sword, scuffling of feet, hands everywhere,
Then one of them has picked up the bloody fruit
And touches it to me—the visible world dyed red,
The audible world brought back from the dead.
But how? Some of the priests say witchcraft;
Caiaphas swears it never happened at all
And has forbidden me to speak of it.
But there are letters burned onto my retinas: INRI.
It is said that his followers—
Gluttons for irony—still meet in the catacombs
And claim to drink his blood.
Red.
My wife rolls over, muttering, Malchus, go back to sleep.
And so I lie back and trace a finger over the scar tissue—
Wrinkled petals, asymmetrical and pink,
Behind my right ear—and I wait for the cock to crow.
Always the same.
Caiaphas is a good man, and the Law is the Law.
But my dreams are dripping with red,
And I am growing thirsty.
-- Wesley Biddy
Wesley Biddy graduated this year with a Th.M. from Duke Divinity School, having previously earned a B.A. and an M.A. from Lee University and studied poetry for a brief stint at the Iowa Writers’ Workshop. His poems have been published or are forthcoming in The Nantahala Review, The Pedestal, Wicked Alice, ken*again, Language and Culture, The New Pantagruel, and Radix. Wesley plays power soccer (see http://www.powersoccer.net/) with the Shepherd Strikers, an Atlanta-based team, and is currently writing his first novel.
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