The centuries will float to me out of the darkness.
And I shall judge them.
Boris Pasternak

Did He notice the twisted starlight,
the crack in the arch, the storm coming on
like news? The apostles' steady breaths

nick the silence—they dream
of hillside sermons and deliverance.

Between their humped forms
and the garden's writhen lines, He sees
a faceless creature with reptilian eyes and gait
emerge. It offers his life vesseled

in an envenomed cup. The throes:

He cries out—
the close air swallows the sound.
Abba, the thud of fallen fruit.

Through the broken arch,
the glint of hilts, the flourish of nodding plumes.
The sky over His shoulder breaks.