CHRIST, OLD STUDENT IN A NEW SCHOOL
Ray Bradbury
O come, please come, to the Poor Mouth Fair
Where the Saints kneel round in their underwear
And say out prayers that most need saying
For needful sinners who've forgotten praying;
And in every alcove and niche you spy
The living dead who envy the long-since gone
Who never wished to die.
Then, see the Altar! There the nailed-tight crucifix
Where Man in place of Christ gives up the ghost,
And priests with empty goblets offer Us
As Host to Jesus Who, knelt at the rail,
Wonders at the sight
Of Himself kidnapped off cross and man nailed there
In spite of all his cries and wails and grievements.
Why, why? he shouts, these nails?
Why all this blood and sacrifice?
Because, comes from the belfries, where
The mice are scuttering the bells and mincing rope
And calling down frail Alleluiahs
To raise Man's hopes, said hopes being blown away
On incensed winds while Christ waits there
So long prayed to, He has Himself forgot the Prayer.
Until at last He looks along a glance of sun
And asks His Father to undo this dreadful work
This antic agony of fun.
No more! He echoes, too. No more!
And from the cross a murdered army cries: No more!
And from above a voice fused half of iron
Half of irony gives man a dreadful choice.
The role is his, it says, Man makes and loads his dice,
They sum at his behest
He Dooms himself. He is his own jest.
Let go? Let be?
Why do you ask this gift from Me?
When, trussed and bound and nailed,
You sacrifice your life, your liberty,
You hang yourself upon the tenterhook!
Pull free!
Then suddenly, upon that cross immense,
As Christ Himself gives stare
Three billion men-in-one blink wide their eyes, aware!
Look left! Look right!
At hands, as if they'd never seen a hand before,
Or spike struck into palm
Or blood adrip from spike,
No! never seen the like!
The wind that blew the benedictory doors
And whispered in the cove and dovecot sky
Now this way soughed and that way said:
Your hand, your flesh, your spike.
You will to give and take,
Accept the blow, lift the hammer high
And give a thunderous plunge and pound,
You make to die.
You are the dead.
You the assassin of yourself
And you the blood
And you the one Foundation Ground on which red spills
You the whipping man who drives
And you the Son who sweats all scarlet up the hills
to Calvary;
You the Crowd gathered for the thrill and urge
You both composer and dear dread subject of the dirge
You are the jailor and the jailed,
You the impaler and you the one that your own
Million-fleshed self in dreams by night
Do hold in thrall and now at noon must kill.
Why have you been so blind?
Why have you never seen?
The slave and master in one skin
Is all your history, no more, no less,
Confess! This is what you've been!
The crowd upon the cross gives anguished roar;
A moment terrible to hear.
Christ, crouched at the rail, no more can bear
And so shuts up his ears with hands.
The sound of pain he's long since grown to custom in his wits,
But this! the sound of wilful innocence awake
To self-made wounds, these children thrown
To Revelation and to light
Is too much for his sanity and sight.
Man warring on himself an old tale is;
But Man discovering the source of all his sorrow
In himself,
Finding his left hand and his right
Are similar sons, are children fighting
In the porchyards of the void?!
His pulse runs through his flesh,
Beats at the gates of wrist and thigh and rib and throat,
Unruly mobs which never heard the Law.
He answers panic thus:
Now in one vast sad insucked gasp of loss
Man pries, pulls free one hand from cross
While from the other drops the mallet which put in the nail.
Giver and taker, this hand or that, his sad appraisal knows
And knowing writhes upon the crucifix in dreadful guilt
That so much time was wasted in this pain.
Ten thousand years ago he might have leapt off down
To not return again!
A dreadful laugh at last escapes his lips;
The laughter sets him free.
A Fool lives in the Universe! he cries.
That Fool is me!
And with one final shake of laughter
Breaks his bonds.
The nails fall skittering to marble floors.
And Christ, knelt at the rail, sees miracle
As Man steps down in amiable wisdom
To give himself what no one else can give:
His liberty.
And seeing there the Son who was in symbol vast
Their flesh and all,
Hands him an empty cup and bades Him drink His fill
And Christ, gone drunk on laughter,
Vents a similar roar,
Three billion voices strong,
That flings the bells in belfries high
And slams, then opens, every sanctuary door;
The bones in vaults in frantic vibrancy of xylophone
Tell tunes of Saints, yes, Saints not marching in but out
At this hilarious shout!
And having given wine to dissolve thrice ancient hairballs
And old sin,
Now Man puts to the lips and tongue of Christ
His last Salvation crumb,
The wafer of his all-accepting smile,
His gusting laugh, the joy and swift enjoyment of his image:
Fool.
It is most hard to chew.
Christ, old student in a new school
Having swallowed laughter, cannot keep it in;
It works itself through skin like slivers
From a golden door
Trapped in the blood, athirst for air;
Christ, who was once employed as single son of God
Now finds himself among three billion on a billion
Brother sons, their arms thrown wide to grasp and hold
And walk them everywhere,
Now weaving this way, now weaving that in swoons,
Snuffing suns, breathing in light of one long
Rambled aeon endless afternoon . . . .
They reach the door and turn
And look back down the aisle of years to see
The rail, the altar cross, the spikes, the red rain,
The sad sweet ecstasy of death and hope
Abandoned, left and lost in pain;
Once up the side of Calvary, now down Tomorrow's slope,
Their palms still itching where the scar still heals,
Into the marketplace where, so mad the dances
And the reels, Christ the Lord Jesus is soon lost
But found again uptossed now here, now there
In every multi-billioned face! There! See!
Some sad sweet laughing shard of God's old Son
Caught up in crystal blaze fired out at thee.
Ten thousand times a million sons of sons move
Through one great and towering town
Wearing their wits, which means their laughter
As their crown. Set free upon the earth
By simple gifts of knowing how mere mirth can cut the bonds
And pull the blood spikes out;
Their conversation shouts of "Fool!"
That word they teach themselves in every school,
And, having taught, do not like Khayyam's scholars
Go them out by that same door
Where in they went,
But go to rockets through the roofs
To night and stars and space,
A single face turned upward toward all Time,
One flesh, one ecstasy, one peace.
The cross falls into dust, the nails rust on the floor,
The wafers, half-bit through, make smiles
On pavements
Where the wind by night comes round
To sit in aisles in booths to listen and confess
I am the dreamer and the doer
I the hearer and the knower
I the giver and the taker
I am the sword and the wound of the sword.
If this be true, then let the sword fall free from hand.
I embrace myself.
I laugh until I weep
And weep until I smile
Then the two of us, murderer and murdered,
Guilty and he who is without guile
Go off to Far Centauri
To leave off losings, and take on winnings,
Erase all mortal ends, give birth to only new beginnings,
In a billion years of morning and a billion years of sleep.
Afterword
What to say about this poem? Say that it is a metaphor of Christ and Man and the fact of man finding himself trapped in a flesh where the Beast rends Human and the Human tries to tame the Beast. Out of this stuff comes War. The trial of man trying to become truly Human over the centuries, in spite of his blood-lust, forces him to weep for his lost opportunities, his many murders, his dead children, done in by those Wars. Christ is the symbol of that failure, and the promise of new opportunities to have a final winning. So Bradbury says.