Poem 223

From a newspaper photo of the Easter ritual in which volunteers undergo the same suffering as Jesus …

( I like the simple lines reconfiguring the words cross, nail and man – indenting and italicising those lines works to put his personal interior pain/experience inside the poem – an electric current at the core (spine) of the external description – and equally underlines the vast gulf between seeing this and being it, the impossibility of we as voyeurs ever being able to penetrate to the centre of the ordeal, a tension which is the animating juice (or blood) of all ritual … )

The Philippines Is The Only Catholic Country In Asia

There's something complex going on here

                they nail a man on a cross

reflected in the guards' chrome helmets
faces bulb out of a blue sky

                he crosses the nails

this one with the claw hammer hopes he doesn't miss
nothing in the bible about 
breaking the fingers

                he mans the cross

lookout across the rice

                his name is Mario
                it's his eighth time up