Editor’s Note: This is the fifth of a fourteen poem song cycle “The Way of the Cross,” by noted poet Herman Sutter.
Station V: Jesus is helped by Simon
Many years after the fact
when pressed by a stranger
I recall nothing of the act.
But surely you remember
he insists, astounded by
my ignorance or neglect
and yet I can only sigh.
Who knows why memory selects
Some events to hold tight
while others we release
almost as they end. A night
when I sat by a tree teased
by my sister until I fled
into the dark and sat alone
angry with the world, my head
resting on my knees, and a stone,
a small stone, bruised my heel.
I remember that bruise still.
And that stone small, hard and real.
My sister’s words I no longer recall.
But this man had fallen beneath a cross.
A Roman pulled you from the street;
Told you to pick it up. It was…
My memory is incomplete
But I remember the guard
Had a nose like a boar:
Bristled and thick and discolored
and on his neck an open sore.
I was scared of the Romans
then. I was always afraid.
If they’d said, kill this man…
But I just did what they said.
Filthy men, smelling of oil,
and wine, and blood and olives.
An entire race one must boil
before touching? how do they live
With themselves? But the Jews…
I should stop talking. I am old.
I remember nothing, and choose
to remember less. Yet how bold
You were. I saw you raise it
on your shoulder. I saw you
step forth.
I was dragged.
Yet you came.
What else could I do?
They tried to get others.
I do not like to remember.
There were men there, his brothers
who…
Do not fan this ember.
Do you know who he was?
I have heard things whispered
about.
But what the Jews
are saying? That he was God?
Do you know there are some
who say he did not die? That
he came forth from his tomb
and walked among them, and sat
and ate and spoke and...
I am
not a Jew. I did nothing
but for fear of Roman
fists.
And yet your name they sing.
Simon, the one who held
the cross for their Lord.
Stop.
What kind of God gets nailed
to a tree and left for…
Stop.
He laughed and touched my arm,
What kind of God gets nailed
to a tree? I mean no harm
old man,
his small laugh failed
in the silence and he rose,
his shadow bending over me,
What we remember, who knows?
You a filthy soldier; me?
Some? Some, Simon, some see
in you a great icon
of service and humility.
A bitter old man, alone–
That is all I see. Simon,
I do not pretend to believe
but I will say just one
more thing before I leave.
Do not dismiss the good
that comes upon you by chance.
The Gods, it is understood,
pierce our lives with a brutal lance
and we must be prepared,
as the Greek who embraced
the swan, to find ourselves bared,
and abandoned, yet placed
within us is an urgent flame;
a smoldering fire relit
by their sacred touch! Their stain,
like a scar, is on you. Accept it.
And when I looked he was gone.
And I shook as if with cold
and wept for what was done
and what I had so cheaply sold.
Herman Sutter is a school librarian and the award winning author of “The World Before Grace” (Wings Press, 1991) and the blog The World Before Grace (and after). His poetry has appeared in, for example, Touchstone, the Northern Review, Innisfree, and St. Anthony Messenger.
