Good morning everyone.
Good Morning.
This is a part of a longer piece on the Passion I am working on:
Waiting
The smell of blood was in the air, the smell of fear, the smell of death
as the slow process of the execution continued,
long after those who came to taunt got bored
and wandered off back into the city, the day's excitement over.
It takes time to die from pain and exposure and the need to breathe,
a tedious process.
The soldiers made themselves as comfortable as possible,
looking up at their charges from time to time, settling down for the long wait.
Dice passed the time, some, and the same stale jokes,
and daydreams about what to do once they left this crazed country,
Some onlookers stayed behind, women mostly.
The soldiers glanced their way from time to time,
occasionally exchanging a comment about this one or that.
These were not the type of women that looked at soldiers, though,
but instead, their eyes and hearts stayed focused on the man from Gallilee.
They held each other close, this knot of women
Chaperoned by a young man, almost a boy, sad and determined,
all bound by love and fear and shock and grief,
the need to pray, the need to mourn, the need to witness.
Swatting a fly, the centurion looked away from the women,
and thought about his mother, and his father's farm,
and wondered, not for the first time, why he became a soldier