The city suffocates with the smell

Of hemp, soaked in blood, everywhere.

Hour after hour after hour she tosses

From one nightmare to another.

Her bed sheets, once silvered

With the scent of nard, taste of gall.

She dreams she sees her husband, the prefect

Of equivocation, leaning over the portico

Trying to appease the mob’s spite.

A blood-drenched man with woven thorns

Crowning his head stands before him.

He seems to speak in monosyllables

Laced with ancient prophecies.

Something deep within her says to intervene

Plead with the fates, and reverse history,

To barter this god man’s life for human years.

As night vanishes some deeper dark descends.

In the late morning frenzy that follows

She sends her husband her dream

Rolled in a scroll, which he unravels

Then lets drop.

What he has written he has written. A cross

Casts its shadow across her warning. Is this the Christ?

Or just one more raw-boned prisoner

Sentenced to die on Mars’ day.

This article appears in February 11 2013.

Philip C. Kolin is the distinguished professor of English emeritus and editor emeritus of the Southern Quarterly at the University of Southern Mississippi. He has published more than 40 books, including nine collections of poems, the most recent being Reaching Forever: Poems.