Blue Crucifixion Poem by Gerard Smyth

for Clare and Hughie O'Donoghue

Not the crudely sketched
man of sorrows
from the cover-image
of the old school catechism
that was touched
and smudged so much
it lost its mystic fragrance.

And not Gauguin's Yellow Christ
in the Breton countryside,
a Golgotha made strange
by those maids in attendance.
Or Poussin's Redeemer
down from the Cross
under the gaze of the spellbound.

But the Blue Crucifixion
shows a fleshy semblance
of human wreckage that belongs
to a man who was counted
among the transgressors.
Our idea of him electrified
by such mystery as art requires.