Money And Words Of Value Under Crucifixion Poem by Erhard Hans Josef Lang

My Mom used to say:
All that you do, my son, is mere trash,
When you can't turn it into cash,
Whatever the truth you see or speak.

And I heard many others say so, too.

Now I question myself:
Then how does it come,
As that is the good people's standard,
That they themselves, as if with forlorn babies' eyes,
In utmost confident abandon,
Often, almost daily, look up in prayerful moods to One,
Whose saintly words once were well benign and of
The nature of a God-like preacher man,
That but never made Him a single dime or even a cent,
In the end, the preacher Himself only badly slammed and even nailed up,
For all of the treasured words He spread.

How these unpaid-for words of such a priceless soul
Managed, all the same, to
Get themselves affixed for so long over time,
Through milleniums to come
Under the rising and sinking sun,
As THE ever-flowing source of one-&-only true inspiration
And those words keeping themselves yet
Ever renewed through nostalgic sad-sweet sermons on
Physically crossed spiritual truths about the making of man -
Otherwise so highly acclaimed a question of money?

Once benign and saintly words of an unpaid preacher man, whose
life-story
Through millenniums to pass
Has been taken by ever-growing masses of people on the globe as
THE Wholesome Pepper Pill to cure the tongues of all unholy babblers? ?

Or were they paying Him for raising the spirits of the uneasy crowds
Surging to the mountains,
Paying Him for washing greedy wine-bibbers' eyes in their vain
mansions,
Paying Him for making the death-stricken suddenly forget about
The living not worthy of being remembered,
And the ones fallen lame forget about the walks of life of those
guilty?

Nay, they made Him even pay for it - as we all know -
For the good he has sown and strewn
Pay with His own blood so unforgivingly
As that they're seen curdling that wronged blood
Until to-day - two-thousand years into time.

Therefore nowadays, feeling kind of obliged,
They make sure to be paying even
All their minor preachers of the day,
Those who think they have something to sermon on,
And, to be sure, all the clowns, too,
On top of more serious miracle men, even more so.

And that's why my Mom even used to say to me:
All that you do, my son, is mere trash,
When you can't turn it into cash,
Whatever the truth you see or speak.

But I hope that now, after reading this poem,
There will be a few more of you who
Judge a poor poet or poor philosopher again
By the old Aramaic standards -
And not only by your more fortunate sons' values in
What you yourselves couldn't reach up to in life-
In spite of all your words and your money.

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