Deposed,
your feet can be seen,
soles leather-calloused like ours
that have never seen sandals.
Could you walk the hot sand earth
with large nail holes in each foot,
blood caking dust to red adobe?
Up there then we must believe
you hurt not for but like us,
lynched as one among many,
unnamed, unnumbered, unknown.
What the black robes said and say
we hear but do not believe:
that dying you made us well
forever. No: like the young
deer with
broken legs eaten
to death by coyotes and crows,
you, we were conquered, beaten
by men of more power than
our gods gave us, despite sun-
glint obsidian knives whose
priest-cuts kept the heart alive.
Taller men now rule and drain
our blood that
once flowed freely
from the altars, down the steep
stairs of the great pyramid,
into a single silver cup.
Se–or, as bitter to drink
one's own blood as the sour wine
they gave to you in a sponge.
Sweating blood ourselves, we know
your thirst. We have turned our gifts
back to making idols: you
and your mother are the best,
hung in every pueblo church.
She weeps, you bleed, apart. So
we believe. But take this not
for worship. It is pity.
You abide with us, not we
in you. For truth, pain instead:
all of us
have long been dead.