Good Friday Poem by Francis Joseph Sherman

“Surely, O Christ, upon this day
Thou wilt have pity, even on me!
Hold thou the hands of Charnisay,
Or bid them clasp, remembering thee.

“O Christ, thou knowest what it is


To strive with mighty, evil men;
Lean down from thy high cross, and kiss
My arms till they grow strong again.

“(As on that day I drove him back
Into Port Royal with his dead!

Our cannon made the now drifts black,
But there, I deem, the waves were red.) [page 133]

“Yea, keep me, Christ, until La Tour
(Oh, the old days in old Rochelle!)
Cometh to end this coward’s war


And send his soul straightway to hell.”

…That night, one looking at the west might say
That just beyond the heights the maples flared
Like scarlet banners,—as they do in autumn,—
The sun went down with such imperial splendor.


Near by, the air hung thick with wreathèd smoke,
And not quiet yet had silence touched the hills
That had played all day with thunder of sullen cannon.
But now the veering wind had found the south
And led the following tide up no moon path,


Calling the mists—white as the circling gulls—
In from the outer rocks. Heavy with rain
The fog came in, and all her world grew dark,—
Dark as the empty west.
Though one should stand
(Praying the while that God might bless her eyes)


Upon the seaward cliff the long night through
On such a night as this (O moaning wind!),
I think that dawn—if dawn should ever break—
Would only come to show how void a thing
Is Earth, that might have been no less than Heaven.

Yea, as it was in France so long ago
Where the least path their feet might follow seemed
The path Love’s feet had trodden but yester hour….