“Let the Messiah Come Down Now from the Cross”

The subject has made claims.
Let us see.

Regard this as an experiment.

Doubt has dogged
the whole story from the start:

Thomas, of course,
Jesus himself in the garden,
now those women huddled on the horizon.

The centurion alone was certain,
and such people are capable of anything.

—Elizabeth Poreba

This poem was written in response to the daily readings from Meeting Christ in Prayer.

Elizabeth Poreba is a retired New York City high-school English teacher. She has published two collections of poems, Vexed and Self Help: A Guide for the Retiring, and two chapbooks, The Family Profile and New Lebanon. The eighth line of this poem is from Elizabeth Willis’s poem, “And What My Species Did.” “Ruin from the air” is a reference to the book by the same name, written by Gordon Thomas and Max Morgan Witts.