The Pale Profitable Christ

The Pale Christ sits atop

A pedestal of salt and policy,

A hollow sentinel over the graveyard of tides.

He has watched rubber rafts

Disintegrate like wet bread

Watched the Mediterranean swallow the “surplus” souls

Whose only sin was fleeing the fire

His followers lit.

To the brown child trading the oil-slicked deep

This marble God offers no palm,

No pier, no pity, no balm,

Only the cold, unblinking silence of

A border closed in His name.

But the sky is not a ceiling,

It is a lid beginning to lift.

The Vertical Light descends

A pillar of white-hot gravity,

Striking the sea until the depths

Turn to glass and reveal their cargo.

It pierces the vaulted cathedrals where

The Profitable Christ is kept,

And the Light does not ask for

A passport of confession of faith,

It asks for the brothers who

Were left to the sharks and the salt.

The Light weighs the marble heart

Against the weight of the drowned

And the marble begins to crack under

The pressure of the Truth.

The Light crashes through the

Boardrooms of the arms-dealers

Illuminating the blood-trails that

Lead from the desert to the bank.

It finds the Bishop who preached

Security while the icons wept,

And the Politician who quoted

The Psalms while the fences rose.

The Pale Christ- this mascot of the ‘developed’

This idol of the ledger

Is caught in the glare and the

White quartz begins to smoke.

The Vertical Light strips the

Pigment of the lie away.

It reveals the Man of Sorrows,

The dark-skinned Refugee

The One who was hunted by kings

And killed by the State,

Standing not with the drowners

But with the drowned.

The wrath of the Living God is

A silent, airless room

Where the excuses of the powerful go to die.

There is no “national interest”

In the presence of the great I AM.

There is no “civilisation” to protect

From the “alien” tide.

As the Pale Christ shatters into

A thousand jagged sins,

The voices of the Mediterranean rise

From the silt like thunder

And the hunters find themselves falling

Without a raft, without a shore

Into the hands of a God who remembers

Every face they let sink.