The Arch of Titus

The Arch of Titus
June 1st, 2020

When Caesar sacked Jerusalem, the Temple
Still stood, damaged but unbowed,
Directly in his path; he hadn’t meant
To burn it. But we can picture how
The crossing to that sanctuary went:

Soldiers parting innocents like waves;
The acrid and choke of empire lashing out;
The glee of a small man thugged up into greatness
By fist and fire of others. There would have been something like
The normal of some decades earlier, the business of faith,
If altered by the last four years of siege,
Still hustling in the forecourt, for Caesar
To overturn — and doing so now stride
Into the Holy of Holies, beyond the torn screen,
Lift up the symbols of a True God, and flanked
By his foreign army spoil blistering forth,
Holding them aloft, the light, the law,
And let the Temple he defiled fall.

In Rome, the images of him still hunch
On his hard-earned arch, across a ruined road,
Proving his triumph. In weathered stone he stands
Near eternally in might and holds
What isn’t his up
In monumentally untarnished hands,
Safe in the fiction of his blood-bought frame.
What isn’t seen
Burns in the absent background, an offering
To an emperor of cruelty and no faith:
The mosaic believers crowded before him, singing,
Preaching, changing, stubborn for justice, praying,
Sobbing zealotry, put to tears where they pray,
Cleansed to clear the Temple for the king.