Our Golgothas

photo credits:Tjeerd Wiersma

This year the name Golgotha has intrigued me. While archeologist Google claims the area known as Golgotha is so named due to a rock formation at the site, it makes sense to me that the name represented the area's connection with death. Who knows, maybe beheaded enemies of the state sat atop spears like sentinels on the path to the crucifixion area - welcoming the soon-to-be-dead and warning others away. Tonight, during Maundy Thursday services, I thought how we all may have our personal Golgothas, but we certainly have public ones, and this is a poem for them.

Our Golgothas 

Places of skulls

Where death lurks

Devastatingly explosive,

Waltzing through a side door,

Flying in from overhead.

 

Across the globe, 

Golgothas –

Where the innocent

Are sacrificed

With the guilty;

 

Made to carry

A burden, which

Never belonged to them.

The powerful cursing them

For simply being who they are.

 

For spending their days

in classrooms and playgrounds.

For standing up to oppression.

For choosing – striving – 

to be free.

 

Do we wash our hands of these Golgothas? 

Or cry for more bloodshed? 

Do we jeer with the powerful - 

denying these Golgothas exist?

Maybe, we weep with the grieving. . .

 

The story says

the guilty found salvation on that Golgotha.

Yet the Light still was extinguished.

A punctuated exhale, 

and He was gone.

 

A punctuated exhale,

And they were all gone.

(4.6.23)

photo found on: https://www.frommers.com/slideshows/819378-the-8-spookiest-catacombs-and-tombs-on-the-planet