From the Commonweal archives:Les Murray's great Easter poem, published in the issue datedMarch 26, 1993. The Say-but-the-Word Centurion Attempts a SummaryThat numinous healer who preached Saturnalia and paradoxhas died a slave's death. We were maneuvered into it by priestsand by the man himself. To complete his poem.He was certainly dead. The pilum guaranteed it. His message,unwritten except on his body, like anyone's, was wrappedlike a scroll and dispatched to our liberated selves, the gods.If he has now risen, as our infiltrators gibber,he has outdone Orpheus, who went alive to the Shades.Solitude may be stronger than embraces. Inventor of the mustard tree,he mourned one death, perhaps all, before he reversed it.He forgave the sick to health, disregarded the sex of the Furieswhen expelling them from minds. And he never speculated.If he is risen, all are children of a most high real Godor something even stranger called by that namewho knew to come and be punished for the world.To have knowledge of right, after that, is to be in the wrong.Death came through the sight of law. His people's oldest wisdom.If death is now the birth-gate into things unsayablein language of death's era, there will be wars about religionas there never were about the death-ignoring Olympians.Love, too, his new universal, so far ahead of you it has diedfor you before you meet it, may seem colder than the favors of godswho are our poems, good and bad. But there never was a bad baby.Half of his worship will be grinding his face in the dirtthen lilting it up to beg, in private. The low will rule, and curse by him.Divine bastard, soul-usurer, eros-frightener, he is out to monopolize hatred.Whole philosophies will be devised for their brief snubbings of him.But regained excels kept, he taught. Thus he has done the impossibleto show us it is there. To ask it of us. It seems we are to be the poemand live the impossible. As each time we have, with mixed cries.