2025 NaPM 17 April

[busker]

Crucified

First he was flogged with a nine-tailed whip
that tore into flesh, ripped skin and muscle, as blood
sprayed across the public square for all to see.

A vertical beam awaited as he struggled through
the dark, narrow street with the horizontal piece. Rusty
nails drove into his wrists while he writhed on the ground.

His cross was lifted as vultures circled above. His leg
muscles tired, and his body hung limp. His shoulders
popped out of their sockets; his twisted wrists dislocated.

He drifted near death until an iron mallet crunched
against his thighs, breaking both legs. Birds plucked out
his eyes. Soldiers jeered as he shit blood, naked and exposed,

Night would fall before he died.

Thousands met this fate under ancient Roman rule

Thousands. Including women and children.

---

I would note, the New Testament is explicit about Jesus expiring before the customary breaking of the legs, as one of the prophecies from the Old Testament -- I think it's from the Psalms, but it may also be from the Pentateuch, as it's those books with all the rules on sacrifice -- notes that not a bone of his was to be broken.

---

When the fall of an empire is seen

as a greater ill than the disenfrachisement,

displacement, and later disintegration

of much greater than six million---

in '33 were Hirschfield's archives burned

as Dachau camp was built,

in '38 was Czechoslovakia raped

as Kristallnacht was perpetrated---

then, perhaps, it's not the case

as it is its cold-hearted recipient

which should distress, what kind of man,

what kind of poet, would think that to end

such horror as ended Radnóti or Frank

should somehow be contingent?

Speaking not to the poem but the topic: the final solution didn’t start before ww2. In fact, Hitler’s threat was that if war started, that would be the end of European Jewry. He made that explicit. The annexation of Czechoslovakia was less bad than the colonisation of Asia and Africa by the European powers, so it can be argued that avoiding WW2 by sacrificing Poland and the USSR (inevitably) would have been better than what transpired, but a better argument would be that Germany should have been divided up and completely de industrialised and Germany settled by swarthy males from the colonies to affect demographic change after WW1 and prevent the emergence of a Hitler. Funny that the hack writers of alternative history and their fans only fantasise about certain scenarios.