Ursula, shot dead, marched the ten thousand

virgins, just walked them! with the pope in tow

to say she could or to prove maybe that

the purity of youth was worth the shock

of Huns beheading them, each and every

one, as God’s synchronicity seems to

bargain lives away in those old stories,

 

leaving ribs and shoulder blades and femurs

intricately piled like lattice beneath

the church floor and the bishop’s slippers.

How did she reckon her sad pilgrimage

or, at eleven, marriage to a king?

And Sebastian’s painterly wounding—

What of that? His torso lean and slightly

 

twisted in the beautiful agony of

arrows, while behind his abandoned look

skyward he must have been thinking how

had it come to this with his gift for healing

and his luck, now bound by an empire to a tree

as the archers, job done, departed from their

malfeasance back to the voiceless and blind in the

town?

 

And Jesus, of course, we know his knowing or

not knowing, never having been to Rome or seen the

enemies

of the state suspended like sacks on their limbs

snapped by the roadside. Too late!

He could not have been man and not regretted,

wiser as he confronted Pilate at the bloody bowl,

how much good was left to do and how

his angel knew him in the darkness

as awakened, and infinite and finite.