Clank!

​

I see the excruciating pain alit in His exhausted eyes. Jaw clenched, straining to cry out.

As if He were carrying the weight of the world on His sunken shoulders.

​

Clank!

​

He always loved climbing the sycamore trees beside our home. He would vanish in the mornings
and come back at nightfall with calloused hands ripped apart by the jagged branches.

​

I often told Him that His hands were far more worn from play than the work that needed to be

done.

Clank!

​

One morning, He left as usual but came back crying, lifting His trembling hand to reveal a
fragmented splinter embedded within the etches of His fragile palms. I plucked it out and soon

He was back to the giggling, joy-filled boy I knew.

Little did I know that would be the same material used for His end.

​

Clank!

​

Carpentry was infused into His blood. As He grew, each waking hour seemed to be spent in the

shop, as if wood was the air He breathed.

​

And now, He is nailed to the very thing that was once malleable beneath His own hands.

 

Clank!

​

I wonder, did He gaze upon His own work and see the cross? When He worked with wood, did

He see both His home and His end?

​

With each hammer strike, did He receive fleeting, harrowing visions of what was to come?

 

Clank!

​

Each dwindling heartbeat fades, absolute panic in every bleak inhale of struggle. His scarred

back is caked with blood, gleaming in the cruel, unforgiving sunlight.

To think, the people who cried Hosanna to my Son now scream crucify.

​

Clank!

​

Those around me tore their clothes, sobs of despair poisoning the air. Some lost their Rabbi,

some a political pawn, some a stranger, some the Savior of the world.

​

I lost my Son.

My Son with a splinter.

​

Clank!

​

The wooden sign plastered to His deathbed as a warning to the wicked taunts me, its engravings

striking the last surviving piece of my mourning soul.

​

“King of the Jews”.

​

A little boy longing to cry out for His mother.

​

Clank!

​

The shadowed skies roar and wail, waiting in somber silence as the last sign of life exhales from

His defeated body.

​

The world quakes, the very core of the Earth seeming to grieve my Son’s death. The wretched
winds lift the straggled hair of my shoulders, the entirety of creation itself screaming a melody

only I could understand.

It is finished.