For Those Who Shouted Barabas
Posted by Alysia Harris | Filed under '08 Fall: Notes from Underground, Poetry, Print, Show Poems
Manure. The smell of raw hide.
Everywhere Moans of sleepy beasts woken from the Palestinian dark.
The dark. It hugged everything like I learned a mother would.
The stale air mingled with newborn Elohim
and God among us. Of hay fragranced with blood and sweat and whatever else comes from inside a woman.
Pungent- the night, cinnamoned with lit frankincense.
All at once king. All at once being,
helplessly mortal.
I smelled my mother on me 9 months of amniotic fluid and wet butterfly wings.
Of prayers scented with morning sickness. My bendy plastic limbs.
Freshly oiled serpentine skin on me. It stung like vinegar.
And the taste of it would become one all too familiar.
The salt from the sea burned eyes that just learned how to blink.
This is Galilee. A smell as welcoming as breaking bread.
An aroma that bore your soul
Up and over its shoulders and taught you how to sail as your breathed.
Then doused by the stench of urine in back alley slums. Stinking slop and horse dung.
Of unleavened bread.
Of Bethlehem.
And all at once I loved and pitied man.
I smelled of wood- of puberty, of freshly squeezed Lebanese cedar with the pulp
still clinging to my fingers.
Knew the brashness of splinters way before they ever broke me.
Tied myself to timber to carry it home and laughed for the irony
I smelled the forest on me.
Of hammer-split silence and cypress that sings as it burns.
My carpenter’s belt next to the blacksmith’s metal wives rusting in the rain.
The iron the wood- they tasted pain. Knew it clench fist and up-turned palm.
All at once pauper and martyred God.
I smelled of lepers. Molten skin and untouchable. Adam’s heels,
Achilles tendons snapping in rhythm to Hosanna in the highest.
Of hospitals and the impatience of the dying.
Looked on in horror.
Spit on in public. So humility stinks of saliva,
of three loaves of black bread and the brine under fish scales.
I smelled of miracles. But the men hold their nose.
They will never know the smell of resurrected youths
who got the chance to break in their knees again.
Of a white shroud unwound.
40 days and nights with a giggling hyena for a stomach.
My beard smelling like the wool of shepherdless sheep.
Jasmine scented praise and burnt offering.
Smelled of earth with my hands forever drawing lines in the dirt.
Let he who is without sin cast the first stone.
Of severed ears and coward’s bones.
Of authority of anonymity.
Who is this man, that he casts out devils and makes the blind see?
Of saints-disciples- brothers- of men. Of 3 years of birthday celebrations in the round. Heads resting on shoulders then beside them on the ground,
of 11 bloody martyred crowns. Shaking. Garden praying.
Of lips with silver ducat teeth.
I smelled of an afternoon tart with citrus organs
begging once more to rinse in the Jordan.
Of ebony Palestinian nights -that cruel cruel mother.
Of the siren throats of Jerusalem’s daughters.
The familiar scent of my Father—
I had to climb to the top of a crucifix
Just to get close enough to breathe him in.
So when perched atop Calvary. I smelled everything.
Salt and vinegar. Temples. Timber. Hammers. Pine.
The Cat o’Nine and Judas’s broken swinging spine.
Wrongs. Palms. Lilies. Psalms. My mother. My Father. My altar. Manure…
The scent of flesh and blood was lifted from the ground, reeking of a man handled divinity.
I was crucified, buried, and rose on the 3rd day.
You smell me?
