My feet plod along with growing unease
And a sense that something is wrong.
A feeling that lurks though never quite placed –
My companion as day’s shadows grow long.
Something amiss but more than amiss –
That must warrant grief and despair!
It haunts waking thoughts, ruins all silence
Until it chokes and hangs thick in the air.
Nothing I do appears to suppress
Or quiet its loudening screams.
But I cannot stop seeking to somehow reprieve
The weight fatally crushing it seems.
Pressed in on all sides, my eyes dart about
For some act of mercy or valour,
Some shining light or hero of might,
To break through this sickening pallor.
But to my heart’s great despair, I am searching in vain
Perhaps there is none to be found.
So, I labour on in downcast resignation,
Soul and feet both dragging the ground.
Is this just great misfortune and a sad twist of fate?
A pitiful hand I’ve been dealt?
Or is the world only sadness – and joy a cruel myth?
Only vanity to be tasted and felt?
Are the woes and the anguish and the sorrows that plague me
Scarring wounds with which I’m afflicted?
Have I suffered oppression at the cruel hands of another,
And I still wince at the bruising inflicted?
These thoughts swirl about without answer or solace
While upward I continue to climb.
Ever trudging onward with no target or purpose,
Just a slave to the tedium of time.
What is this place? This gray, lonely place –
Where my journey has dismally led?
“Golgotha,” says a voice. “The place of the skull,
Not fit for the living, no friend to the dead.”
“How fitting,” I think – a hill marked for death
When death feels imminently near
For how else to describe this endless torment inside
Which I know not should I welcome or fear!
I walk on in the darkness as my soul has long done
Bereft of all semblance of hope.
This great Enemy beside me, behind me, inside me
Has left me no manner to cope.
As if nature itself feels the same agony
And the sky this foreboding doom,
His sable fingers stretch forth to blot out the sun,
And the world becomes dark like a tomb.
My eyes turn to the heavens once airy and bright
Now plunged ghastly and dim.
But before it can reach those celestial heights
My gaze is arrested by him.
A man on a tree so battered and bloodied
He’s barely discernibly man.
Flesh hanging in strips as his very life drips
From the nails driven deep through his hands.
I can’t look away from this most murderous scene
So gruesome, so deathly, intense.
Because for once in my life the pain raging inside
Strangely somehow makes sense.
Like some mystic mirror stood masked in between
Myself and this man who hung dying
And every invisible torture I suffered
Was on him now ostensibly lying!
But then spoke a Voice, a near musical voice
That sang soothingly into my head,
“You’ve nothing to do with this poor dying stranger
Who is certainly soon to be dead.”
“Let’s continue our journey – tis ours is this journey
Your journey with me at your side.
Yes, woeful and sad, but the sooner you embrace this,
You’ll grow numb and the pain will elide.”
And almost I turned toward this beckoning voice
And continued my journey awhile
When it began to take shape just outside of my view
And I glimpsed a sinister smile.
From the corner of my eye not daring to look
I watched as the Voice assumed form.
A hideous, spectral, monstrous shape
Though its song was pacifyingly warm.
“You’re a victim,” it whispered, “Crippled and hurt,
A casualty of fate and her war.
Let’s go from this place and not think on these things,
And be pestered and bothered no more.”
And with that last line though reassuringly offered
As if to avoid raising alarm,
It became unmistakably clear that this Voice was no friend
And only intended me harm
I turned back to the man hoisted up to the sky
Who seemed placed there as if in my stead.
“But that’s madness!” I cried. “It simply can’t be.”
“Madness. Just madness,” I said.
Then Another’s voice came like a bolt from the heavens
With answer unmistakably plain!
The torture, the agony, the suffering, the grief,
The upheaval and chaos and pain!
It wasn’t from others and foisted on me
As if I was an unwitting pawn!
Not misfortune or sad coincidence,
An unlucky hand I had drawn!
The evil was me! The darkness was me!
The hands that wrought violence my own!
As I looked into his eyes, his voice pierced my soul
Tearing through flesh and through bone!
Gone was the sweetness of the previous Voice,
That sickening sweetness of lies.
Here was laid bare the searing starkness of truth
In his eyes – oh how mournful, those eyes!
Prostrate I fell, my face wet with tears, and listened
“It is finished,” he cried.
And there in the gloom on that unearthly night,
In the dark of Golgotha, I died.
Having hung there for hours, stricken and smitten,
Attended only by taunts and by thirst,
He gave up his spirit and with his final breath,
I awoke and inhaled deeply my first.
—Bryce Harrison attended university and lived in South Carolina but now lives in Canada as a pastor of Kings Table Church in Dartmouth, NS. He and his wife, Elizabeth have 4 children.
