ARREST AND TRIAL

He was not the first to suffer for the truth—

and certainly not the last. We haven’t seen

the last. In other times, it might have been

handled summarily, without the uncouth

old instruments of torture—though even now

the thugs of power like to inflict pain.

It reassures them that there is no claim 

to human dignity, that all must bow,

sooner or later, to necessity.

He offered them a chance to put the seal

on their own corruption—and they took the deal

and stripped and beat and nailed him on the tree.

And he still lives in his daughters and his sons.

And they have nothing left to them but ruins.