Suppose That Was Enough

A Good Friday poem. Not the one you think.

Photo by Samuel Lopes on Unsplash

All four Gospels in the New Testament — all four accounts of Jesus’s life — include the story of his trial and execution. In one Gospel, Matthew’s, that larger story includes (and then ignores) an odd little sub-story, one sentence long. No introduction, no sequel; just appears as a blip in the main narrative, then it’s gone.

Scholars can probably say why. A poet just says, “Hey, look at that.”

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THE GOVERNOR'S WIFE						

While Pilate was sitting on the judgment seat, his wife sent word to him, “Have nothing to do with that innocent man, for I have been much troubled in a dream on account of him.”  - The Gospel According to Matthew, 27:19


Here’s what I want to know about the wife
of Pilate, much troubled in a dream
on account of an innocent man: how did she come
to dream at all of that strange innocent,
that Galilean peasant, through what side-door
had this unwashed unknown trespassed the palace
of the governor, the imagination of his lady?
It must have been so little: a servant maybe
who passed the pool of Bethesda in time to see
a grumbling cripple seized by a strong hand
and hauled upright; or her husband, bored again
by the Hebrew priests’ complaints (as though he should grieve
their loss of a day’s income, when some malcontent
whipped their shop-boys from the Temple!); or had she,
in her own noble person, stood by a window
the day the shout went up in the street, when songs
and green leaves filled the air, and all to greet
a young gray donkey, silly with dignity,
and the man who waved from its back like a jester,
like a king? When she looked down, the governor’s lady
at her high window, was that when he looked up
to find and meet her there above the shouting,
above the palms — eye to eye, face to face,
soul to soul, for one unending, unexpected instant?

Much troubled in a dream. So much so, she put words
to her trouble, sent word to trouble Pilate,
harassed amidst his court. Here’s what I want
to know: this lady, did she dream her words
could change the innocent man’s fate? She failed, then;
nothing was spared him, no one listened, nothing
changed. We say. Suppose, though, that her message,
half-heard, ignored by his impatient judge, somehow
had reached him too, that somehow being seen
in one unseen woman’s dream, his innocence declared
in her unheeded words, suppose that was enough,
when there was nothing else, to change the story just
a little, show him just a little reason
to pick up his pain, uneased by bitterness, and bear it
to its terrible end? Suppose the smallest truth,
the smallest love, that changes nothing, still,
when there is nothing else, can be enough
sometimes, can sometimes still be more?

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[You can listen to an audio version of the poem using the little widget above the photograph.]

This poem showed up in 2002. (Goodness .) I like it because it pays attention to that odd little sub-story, and especially to this unnamed woman whom we’ll never hear of again. I like it for the “high-born Roman lady” diction that somehow creeps in, especially in the first stanza. I like it most (I realize as I write this) for the way it uses the sub-story to echo and underline a theme from the larger narrative: Act in love and truth, speak in love and truth, even if your words and actions seem to change nothing, even if the powers-that-be respond by ignoring or crushing or disappearing you, even if you fail completely … because failure is failure and death is death, but failure and death aren’t necessarily the end of the story. Not when love and truth are at the story’s heart.