Tag: god

All sudden,
the trill of the small brown thrush
that chirruped by
the Kidron’s chattering rush
stopped short –
stilled by… What? Some mad
intensity of hammering, erupting
from beyond the city’s northern wall …


(From ‘Of Gods and Men’)



Beyond the northern wall of the Old City of Jerusalem lay its execution ground. This was the hill known in Greek as Golgotha (the Place of the Skull), and in Latin (according to the four canonical Christian Gospels), Calvary. Crucifixion was a normal Roman method of execution, the standard procedure for sins as small as petty theft. By no means unusual punishment; but the one signified here has, as is well-known, been engraved in countless minds for over two-thousand years. The Kidron is a brook – a wadi, or periodic stream which flows only following heavy rains – mentioned in both the Hebrew and Greek (Christian) Scriptures. Its Kidron Valley runs parallel to Jerusalem’s eastern wall, between the Temple Mount (which is within the wall), and, outside, the Mount of Olives and nearby Gethsemane, all of which are associated with the life and especially the last days of Jesus. The garden of the latter is famously known as the place of his betrayal.

The poem’s title is taken from There is a Green Hill Far Away, the well-known 19th century Easter Passion hymn. Appearing in her 1848 Hymns for Little Children, it was penned by Anglo-Irish poet and hymn writer Cecil Frances Alexander (1818-1895); she also wrote All Things Bright and Beautiful and Once in Royal David’s City, All three songs remain widely popular today.

The inspiration for this brief poem came directly from a single sentence, with its astounding contrast between the moment of affright which abruptly stopped the song of a small bird and a cause and an event wholly outside its compass. It’s from Robert Nichols’ (1893-1944) extraordinary, futuristic and startlingly prophetic 1923 story Golgotha & Co. Born of the colossal hecatomb of The Great War, penned in the squalid disillusionment of its wake and envisioning governance in the aftermath of a second such upheaval, this is an engrossing tale of Wealth and Power v. the People – intertwined with an esoteric dimension cleverly hinged upon the event at Jerusalem. Preceding Orwell’s Nineteen Eighty Four by more than a quarter of a century, it cuts like a laser beam – to march with the times – into goalpost-shifting leadership and sensationalized, suggestion-lulled populations … and, as part of the story, the fickleness, frailty, and fealty of belief.

Anyway: Easter greetings to all who celebrate it!  Pasg Hapus i bawb!