Once at sunset Jesus and his disciples
were on the road outside the walls of Zion
when suddenly they came to where the town
for years had dumped its garbage.
Crowning the highest pike, its legs
pointing at the sky, lay a dog’s bloated carcass;
such a stench rose up from it that all the disciples, hands
cupped over their nostrils, drew back as one man.
But Jesus stood there, and He gazed
so closely at the carcass that one disciple
called out from a distance,
Rabbi, don’t you smell that dreadful stench?
How can you go on standing there?
Jesus, His eyes fixed on the carcass,
answered : If your breath is pure, you’ll smell
the same stench inside the town behind us, but
Look – that dog’s teeth glitter in the sun :
like hailstones, like a lilly, beyond decay,
a great pledge, mirror of the Eternal, but also
the harsh lightning flash, the hope of Justice!
And now, Lord I,
the very least of men, stand before You,
give me, as now I walk outside this Zion,
as I walk through this terrible stench,
one single moment of Your holy calm,
so that I may also pause
among this carrion and with my own eyes
somewhere see deep inside me,
beyond the world’s decay, like the dog’s teeth
at which, Lord, that sunset You gazed in wonder :
a great pledge, mirror of the Eternal, but also
the harsh lightning-flash, the hope of Justice!
Άγγελος Σικελιανός (1884-1951)
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