Mirage

When Christ descends to hell, he knows in a flash
that human time has run from him. He knows
this is his father’s house, albeit a once
forbidden room. Unable to bring himself
to look upon the damned—the pitiful
unpitiables to whom he is at most
a mirage, a permanently waning north
star that hangs above the pit’s horizon—
he listens to their rising monotone.

He circles them, and soon he can pick out
as though by some infernal doppler effect
the cries of those who weren’t yet even born
when Christ was crucified; of those whose deaths
are two or three millennia removed
from when he saw the Jordan, fresh in his mind.

The errant souls of the future bound together
with those of antiquity: Eternity
collects them all at once… Perturbed and faint,
he grieves the years before his second coming.

For now, he has a rendezvous to keep
with his disciples, dimly reassured
that he can tell them nothing of what he’s heard.