Easter 1984

When we saw human dignity

healing humans in the middle of the day

we moved in on him slowly

under the incalculable gravity

of old freedom, of our own freedom,

under atmospheres of consequence, of justice

under which no one needs to thank anyone.

If this was God, we would get even.

And in the end we nailed him,

lashed, spittled, stretched him limb from limb

We would settle with dignity

for the anguish it had caused us,

we'd send it to be abstract again,

we would set it free.

*****

But we had raised up evolution.

It would not stop being human.

Ever afterwards, the accumulation

of freedom would end in this man

whipped, bloodied, getting the treatment.

It would look like man himself getting it.

He was freeing us, painfully, of freedom,

justice, dignity — he was discharging them

of their deadly ambiguous deposit,

remaking out of them the primal day

in which he was free not to have borne it

and we were free not to have done it,

free never to torture man again,

free to believe him risen.

*****

Remember the day when life increased,

explainably or outright, was haloed in poignancy,

straight life, given not attained, unlurching ecstasy,

arrest of the guards for once, and ourself released,

splendour taking detail, beyond the laughter-and-tears

if those were gateway to it, a still or moving utterness

in and all around us. Four have been this human

night and day, steadily. Three fell, two went on.

A laser of this would stand the litter-bound or Lazarus

upright, stammering, or unshroud absent Jesus

whose anguish was to be for a whole day lost to this,

making of himself the companionway of our species

up from where such love is an unreal, half-forgotten

peak, and not the baseline of the human

~Les Murray