Sonnet: The After Image of Love, Look Closely
by John Kendall Hawkins
In this scenario, God is dead. If you look
closely at the frame, you'll see him walking the light,
and the morning's emptiness seems fresh with new sight,
the crucifix on the hill is the focal hook.
The frame comes at the end of a film: One man's life
filled with the gold of giving hope, seized and taken,
asks as we all do, Why have I been forsaken?
In the silence that ensues, temptation and grief
form the nexus of a simple cosmology,
where order and chaos fight, endless upheavals
forever unresolved, alive in cathedrals
as introjected torment, God's tautology.
Pilate, Rome's deep state operative: Ecce Homo.
We reel now, the emptiness felt, death in slo-mo.