Blood And Chocolate

    

                                                      Blood And Chocolate

Arrested at night, illegally

Surrounded by soldiers,

Blood, sweat and tears matting his hair and beard;

Violence erupts, swords slice-

'Enough' he says, and it is enough.

Grabbed, pushed, he is beaten:

Who hit you? Sneers and scorn.

Spat on, bruised and bloody;

Then he is punished;

For being the King of the Jews, the punishment is harsh,

What the Jews have always been given:

Betrayal, abandonment,

Torture, humiliation, death;

Death on a cross.

Flayed alive, nearly to death,

Crown of thorns, blood blinding him,

Staggering up the hill, the Place of Skulls;

And then, the crux of the matter,

Nine inch nails through his wrists,

Shoulders dislocated, hanging there,

He is crucified.

Looking out with love, he forgives us all,

And so he dies.

He dies, for us,

And, about two thousand years later,

We celebrate with chocolate.

                                                               Bloodshod Gospel

Bloodshod, the men struggled on

In the war to end all wars;

Tired of fear of death at any moment, no sustenance in sight,

They continued because they had no choice

If they were to defeat the evil oppressor.

Yet we are in a far greater war,

That's been going on almost since time began;

And we don't fight as hard.

We have no choice either, given the alternative,

Yet we give up all too easily.

They fought (and died) for years

In hellish conditions,

Can we not do likewise?

They fought for their countries, for freedom,

That many they would never know could live in hope;

They gave their lives, should we not do so too?

No-one warned them what war would be like,

And how many of the flowers of youth would meet their end;

The four horsemen sowed and reaped their harvest there.

Nothing we could go through could be as bad,

Though it may go on longer;

And we have a constant companion,

The Helper, to save us when things overwhelm.

Lord, bring us to life, bring us to love:

May we have hard feet instead of hard hearts,

And may those feet be bloodshod.

 

I got the title for the first one from an Elvis Costello album; apart from that it is pretty self explanatory, but the second may need a bit of explanation. The title comes from two places, a line in the poem 'Dulce Et Decorum Est', "...Many had lost their boots/But limped on, bloodshod"; and the phrase 'Roughshod Gospel' talking about preachers moving from town to town. The wars referred to are WWI, and the fact that we are actually in a spiritual war. One that we can't win on our own; but we're not on our own. And the end comes from something that Jackie Pullinger once said, along the lines of 'the gospel needs people with hard feet and soft hearts; the problem is too many have soft feet and hard hearts'.