David Gascoyne(1916–2001)
Ecce Homo
W h o s e is this horrifying face,
This putrid flesh, discoloured, flayed,
Fed on by flies, scorched by the sun
W h o s e are these hollow red-filmed eyes
And thorn-spiked head and spear-stuck side
Behold the Man: He is Man's Son.
Forget the legend, tear the decent veil
That cowardice or interest devised
To make their mortal e n e m y a friend,
To hide the bitter truth all His wounds tell,
Lest the great scandal be no more disguised:
He is in agony till the world's end,
And we must never sleep during that time!
He is suspended on the cross-tree now
And we are onlookers at the crime,
Callous contemporaries of the slow
Torture of God. Here is the hill
Made ghastly by His spattered blood
Whereon He hangs and suffers still:
See, the centurions wear riding-boots,
Black shirts and badges and peaked caps,
Greet one another with raised-arm salutes;
They have cold eyes, unsmiling lips;
Yet these His brothers know not what they do.3
And on his either side hang dead
A labourer and a factory hand,
Or one is maybe a lynched Jew
And one a Negro or a Red,
Coolie or Ethiopian, Irishman,
Spaniard or German democrat.
Behind His lolling head the sky
Glares like a fiery cataract
Red with the murders of two thousand years
Committed in His name and by
Crusaders, Christian warriors
Defending faith and property.
Amid the plain beneath His transfixed hands,
Exuding darkness as indelible
As guilty stains, fanned by funereal
And lurid airs, besieged by drifting sands
And clefted 0 landslides our about-to-becloven, split
Bombed and abandoned cities stand.
He who wept for Jerusalem
Now sees His prophecy extend
Across the greatest cities of the world,
A guilty panic reason cannot stem
Rising to raze them all as He foretold;knock down
And He must watch this drama to the end.
Though often named, He is unknown
To the dark kingdoms at His feet
Where everything disparages His words,
And each man bears the common guilt alone
And goes blindfolded to his fate,
And fear and greed are sovereign lords.
3. "Then said Jesus, Father, forgive them; for they know not what they do (Luke 23.34).
T h e turning point of history
Must c o m e . Yet the complacent and the proud
And w h o exploit and kill, may be d e n i e d —
Christ of Revolution and of Poetry—
T h e resurrection and the life4
W r o u g h t by your spirit's blood.
Involved in their o w n sophistry
T h e black priest and the upright man
Faced by subversive truth shall be struck dumb,
Christ of Revolution and of Poetry—
W h i l e the rejected and c o n d e m n e d b e c o m e
Agents of the divine.
N o t from a monstrance5 silver-wrought
But from the tree of h u m a n pain
Redeem our sterile misery,
Christ of Revolution and of Poetry—
That man's long journey through the night
May not have b e e n in vain.
P. K. PAGE
b. 1916