Palm Sunday without Air-Raid Warnings

Three Holy Week poems by Lawrence “Mack in Texas” Hall

Palm Sunday without Air-Raid Warnings

Palm Sunday is easy for the rest of us
A procession with palms from the parking lot
Praising God through an asphalt Jerusalem
A Subaru on His right hand, a Dodge on His left

Palm Sunday is easy for the rest of us
The front of the procession out of tune with the back
Or is it the other way around? Catholics, eh

Palm Sunday is easy for the rest us –
No burning streets, no screaming wounded, no death

An Empty Cross

An empty cross?
There is no empty cross
Fragments of bone and flesh forever stain
The spikes, the wood, the cross, the bloody cross
Is not a cute designer collectable

An empty cross?
There is no empty cross
His crucifixion takes away our sins
But the bloodstains remind us
It was our sins that drove the spikes into Him

An empty cross?
There is no empty cross
There won’t be, not until the last day of all

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Pontius Pilate and His Dog

When a man’s worked all day in signing off
On having any number of his fellow men
Imprisoned, flogged, branded, imprisoned, or chained
He’s happy to come home to his good ol’ dog

The master whistles, his happy dog barks
Man and beast in happy concord meet
Playfully tussling in their mutual love
While the servants cringe and cower in fear

What difference if a man executes his brother
As long as he and his dog have each other?

Author’s Note: The curious idea of Pontius Pilate having a dog to love is in Bulgakov’s The Master and Margarita, p. 311 in the Penguin edition. The paragraph is almost as touching as Senator Vest’s courtroom speech, “Tribute to the Dog.”