The Centurion's Report
by Richard Jackson
Well, we’d been many times up by the quarry where
people claimed to see skull faces lurking in the limestone.
I could almost see them myself from the road.
But, yes, I was
the one who said it.
When I heard Him call out a prayer,
I knew.
I don’t know how I knew, but I knew.
Sometimes
your body shivers to tell you its secrets.
What I heard was
a man who was more than a man.
It wasn’t the sky’s sudden
darkening then splitting open like a curtain,
not the reports
that the dead were walking the streets that shouldered
the others together in fear.
I had heard those rumors
before every battle,
the desperate insults thrown like
dice,
taunts shredding the air.
But that darkness, it held,
I don’t know how to say it,
a kind of invisible light
and
a silence that seemed to fill the sky with unspoken words
flying about like sparrows.
It was enough for me then.
There are truths to be found beyond the mist of voices.
I dropped my sword, my spear, took off my breastplate,
my helmet, my cloak
and turned to follow the women
who had once followed him,
back into town, and beyond,
for there is a whole geography of hope that we must travel.
Richard Jackson is the author of eighteen books of poems as well as a dozen of essays, interviews, translations, and editions. Winner of Guggenheim, Fulbright, NE, NEH, and The Order Of Freedom from the President of Slovenia, his poems have been translated into seventeen languages.
