Lord, at the third hour we hoisted
Them up on the crossed poles – the people’s prophet,
And the two robbers taken in the act
(Heavy to lift, great-armed and bushy-bearded:
I’ve seen the Carthaginians, that was, crucify
Two lions with snares taken, harriers of the fold.)

It was hot on the bald hill;
Though I’ve a good enough stomach I never liked
Butcher’s work drawn out – the quick sword
Rather, the thing done hand-to-hand hot blooded;
And afterwards with bandaged wounds to lie drinking
Black wine somewhere under the shade of a sycamore,

Watching the village women fill their jars
At a cold stream, tremulous, feasting our eyes.
We Greeks are easy-going . . . Forgive me,
Lord – What did you ask? The prophet?
He died soon (they flogged him well out of kindness,
Remembering your favour): he was dead by sundown.

How did he take it? Better than most: no word
Until the finish, and then in the people’s language
I never cared to learn – a prayer maybe
Or a nursery rhyme, they’ll say anything, strung there.
I thought he was talking to someone, but no one
Was there, only us and the temple hangers-on.

After he died, the earthquake that upset me.
I never liked this country – hard
Waterless rock, men like longfaced camels
And their hot fruity women; a man not knowing
Whether it’ll be next a knife in the back
Or poisoned dates, or something new like the earthquake.

And he played on my nerves, there sweating blood
And flyblown, with that broad Nubian forehead.
Not the torture: that’s the way we live.
But he had the look of one not made for it;
As if we were doing a job we had no right to.
Lord, excuse my babbling. It was the earthquake.

page 119

Notes on a Poem

• (1) He addresses Pilate as Lord, as you or I would the Man on the Cross. I play on the idea that the natural end of semi-atheistical humanism is State- worship. The poem is by implication also anti-militant – the centurion is prepared to crucify Christ as the ordinary modern soldier would be prepared to shoot Him, as a member of a firing squad, because it is his duty.
• (2) I try to make the point that the Crucifixion was an ordinary event (the Romans often executed their criminals that way), different not because of the manner of execution but because of who was being executed.
• (3) Some people to whom I have shown the poem have objected to my making Christ negroid (‘that low broad Nubian forehead’). I do it partly just to counteract the opposite tendency of making Him look like a rather ineffectual bearded Englishman in a toga. Actually, of course, we don’t know what He looked like. But mainly I did it as a hard-hitting symbol of the fact that He represented all colours and nationalities equally. One could I think justify it on the grounds that Mary was descended from Ruth, who was a Moabite by extraction.
• (4) The temple hangers-on – for the centurion, a Greek, the disciples would be just ‘temple hangers-on’.
• (5) The centurion has had a shock but doesn’t know the cause of it, and is busily attributing it to the earthquake as any average NZer would attribute his discomfort rising from the state of his conscience to the weather or the quality of the beer. He just knows that the earthquake has shaken his cosmology as well as the ground, and he is running away from this powerful Mystery.
• (6) He is no fool. ‘Not the torture: that’s the way we live’ . . . is a pointer to an attitude which accepts the frequent presence of physical and (though he would not use the term) spiritual agony. His earthly paradise indicated early in the poem is rest after battle with a keg of wine and a cushy wound.

1953 (63)