If Jesus Was Real.

 

If Jesus was real, he would not arrive in a halo of soft focus.

He would be a postcode in a rubble-strewn district of the Levant.

A wet rattle of grey dust returning from the ruin of a Gazan high-rise.

An Arab man with the dirt of the occupation under his fingernails.

The genealogy of the dispossessed written in the sweat on his brow.

He would be the immigrant stumbling through the Kentish surf.

Lungs a heavy sponge of salt and oil and death.

A stateless ghost in a high-vis world that only counts the dead.

What if he returned as Hind Rajab?

Six years of light extinguished in the back of a black Kia.

Surrounded by the cold metal of his own people’s ghosts.

Screaming into a dead phone line while the tanks hummed their low mechanical hymn.

The red machinery of the heart stopped by a precision strike.

No angels came to the rescue.

Only the dial tone and the smell of scorched upholstery.

A child’s blood staining the map of a promised land.

What if he was the miscarried hope in a waterlogged tent?

A knot of unformed cells in the mud of a genocide.

Sloughing off into the grey puddles of a camp.

Too small for a shroud.

Too quiet for a resurrection.

The biological glitch of a life that refused to be born into a furnace.

A wet thump of grief against the plastic sheeting.

While the world watches on a five-inch screen and scrolls past the rot.

He would wrap himself in a shroud of a keffiyeh.

The black and white lattice a second skin over the charred meat.

His back a red geography of the whip.

Skin flayed into ribbons like the pages of a burnt book.

The flesh unzipping to reveal the white gleam of the ribs.

A xylophone of trauma played by the centurion’s leather.

Purple bruising blooming like a storm cloud across the abdomen.

The body a map of state-sanctioned cruelty.

The stigmata would be architectural failures.

Jagged ruptures where the bone was splintered by a nail.

Forged in the heat of a regional war and sold for a tidy profit.

The iron spikes forcing the wrists into a permanent dislocation.

The sound of metal meeting marrow a dry snap in the heat.

The holes in his hands would be wide and weeping.

Permanent drains where the guilt of the world spills out.

He cannot hold it.

He tries to cup his palms to catch the falling children.

But it all pours through the gaps onto the boots of the border guards.

Was he Adnan Al-Bursh?

Stolen from the theatre of healing the poor.

Stripped to his underwear in the biting cold of a desert cage.

The hands that mended the shattered limbs of children now broken by the interrogator.

A surgeon of the people reduced to a number in the dark.

Beaten until the light in his eyes became a medical record of defeat.

The healer murdered in the catacombs of the empire’s prison.

Was he Refaat Alareer?

Preaching poetry for morale in the shadow of the drone.

Bombed away from the pen and the lecture hall.

Targeted for the crime of telling the story of the kite.

His words a silhouette against the fire of the phosphorus.

The ink of his heart spilled across the concrete dust.

A targeted erasure of the one who taught the world how to scream.

He would be shot at a checkpoint by an IDF soldier.

A split-second erasure for the crime of holding a bag of flour.

The industrial weight of the nails and the cold steel of the hammer.

A joint venture in the ongoing crucifixion of the global south.

They nail him to the map of a country they have erased.

And wonder why the earth tremors beneath their feet.

It is the sound of the brass plate cracking under the weight of the truth.

He would be damned into the white-tiled silence of the Victorian ward.

A biometric error that the state must pathologise to keep the ledger clean.

The radical survivor diagnosed as a delusion of the recently bombed.

They would call the memory of the fire a chemical imbalance.

Sedated into a cosh of heavy silence to drown out the scream of the drones.

The body an institutionalised glitch in the empire’s smooth operation.

A ghost in a thin gown whose very pulse is a riot against the sedative.

The irony is the pious would be the first to kill him again.

The Christians in their Sunday best would call the police.

They would see the Arab, the radical, the man without a visa.

They would see the threat to their property values and their peace.

They would not recognise the Messiah in the smell of the morgue drawer.

They would demand the centurion.

They would hammer the nails themselves to protect the tax status of the cathedral.

He is a brand they sold, not a man they ever intended to love.

And if God is real, I wouldn't believe in him, look at the weeping gangrene he has called a world.

I would grab that celestial architect by the throat.

Demand the schematics for the shrivelled stomach and the cellular rot of the child's marrow.

We are just a smear of meat on a glass slide to him.

A culture of agony harvested for the sick entertainment of a bored surgeon.

He is the boy with the magnifying glass boiling the skin of the ants.

Watching the twitch and the blacken for the sake of a cosmic curiosity.

I reject a father who walked away mid-incision and left the patient to bleed out in the dark.

His eyes are clouded with the milky film of the recently deceased.

Staring at the heavens with a terrifying lack of expectation.

He knows there is no father waiting to receive his spirit.

Only the cold vacuum of a universe that does not care for the victim.

He is the ultimate atheist.

The one who died and found nothing but the cold fact of extinction.

Dragged back into the light by the cruel necessity of our need for a martyr.

The ghost of the class struggle haunting the boardroom.

The resurrection is a horror show of reanimated meat.

He stands in the ruins and vomits up the wine of the last supper.

A sour vinegar of betrayal that stains the white robes of the NGOs.

He was murdered for being inconvenient to the empire.

Brought back to life to be used as a logo for the murderers.

He is the Arab, the immigrant, the bombed and the broken.

He does not offer you his peace.

He offers you his scars and the memory of the fire.

Let the cathedrals crumble into the rising sea.

Let the bibles turn to mulch in the rain.

We do not need a god to tell us the world is bleeding.

We only need to look at the holes in our own palms.

The truth is found in the strike line and the barricade.

The raw reality of a life lived without the crutch of a cruel creator.

The saviour is a myth we tell ourselves to justify the silence.

There is no heaven waiting, only the grit of the earth and the fire this time.

We have torn the crown from the empty sky.

And pressed the thorns into our own bleeding brows.

No one is coming down to save the child in the rubble.

No ghost is going to overturn the tanks or stop the missiles mid-flight.

We have declared ourselves our own gods in this slaughterhouse.

We have to act like it.

Seize the lightning from the hands of the indifferent.

Become the miracle we were promised by a father who never existed.

The only holy thing is the hand that pulls the survivor from the dust.

The only divine act is the refusal to be silent while the patient bleeds out.

We are the architects of the new world, built from the bones of the old.

Do not pray for mercy to a surgeon who has already left the room.

Seize the discarded scalpel with the hands of the dispossessed.

Suture the jagged geography of the flayed back.

Incinerate the map of the checkpoint and the wire.

We are the only ones left to drag the living from the silt.