Lionel Willis
About this Christian Poet:
After I retired from teaching English at Ryerson University in Toronto in 1992, I went to Florence, Italy, with my wife—an American—to work as volunteer custodians of The Church of St. James (Episcopalian), "La chiesa Americana". We stayed in Tuscany for five years. During that period I participated in the church's Education for Ministry program. Near completion of the fourth year of the program I set myself the Lenten exercise of "Thoughts on the Seven Last Words of Christ on the Cross", from which the prize-winning piece is excerpted. It is the fourth stanza of the work. Part of my inspiration was the choral work "The Seven Last Words of Christ" by Franz Josef Haydn. My cycle of seven Petrarchan sonnets with concluding Envoi has been accepted in whole and in part in the past eleven years on three different occasions and each time has failed to see print because of the death of an editor and the folding of the interested publishers.
Thoughts on the Seven Last Words of Christ
"Eli, Eli, lama sabachthani?"
You've already learned by heart the point pain
Argues over and over till it bores
You stiff. Unanswerably, flesh implores
You to escape, and how can you explain
To it why you must stay? So the inane
Imperative commands again, again,
Beating the message of your many sores
Into each bloody palm until it roars
Through the last dikes of thought and floods your brain.
The moments explode into negative
Infinities. Now you begin to know
The fear of sharing Satan's endless death.
Cut from the Father, the yawn where you live
Expands endlessly, yet it cannot grow
Beyond the effort of another breath.
Copyright ©2008 by Lionel Willis