Classic Poem

The word of all words is the word of the mediator,
The life of all lives is the life mediatorial,
The soul of the continents is the sea that is between,
The substance of earth and the substance of heaven is something that is neither earth nor heaven:
And so may the secular soil and the sacred sky change places, pleading for each other:
And so may doubted things trade with accepted things and the two together proceed upon one pathway:
And so may grief barter with joy, and joy with grief back again, while both draw sustenance from the same source of treasure:
And so by such tokens may the soul partake of the meanings of the body and the body partake of the meanings of the soul.

The dear Christ has been on the cross long enough:
Come, take him down: release him from his patient travail:
You may now go up, taking his place, bleeding yourself from veins your due to the necessitous world.
The cries of ages chorus the soul to the mount of sacrifice:
Shall one alone suffer for all? or shall all suffer for one?
There is a fate worse than falls to the man nailed to a cross:
It is the fate of the man who has no cross.
Here are the slaves who come between and the laborers who come between,
Here are mothers and children serving to bridge the perilous abysses:
Here are the sick for health's sake and here are well people ministering to those who suffer:
Here are ships that go to sea and are not heard of again,
Here are men who die in battle for causes and men who kill in battle for causes also,
Here are criminals in whom Judas is as important as Jesus:
Here is a world without absolution and without guilt:
Here is the ebb and flood of atomic genesis making for reparation out of the worst dismay:
Here are men who dream, other men who speak prophecies, and men truly also who are silent before the sphinx:
Here is the witness of the rain interceding for harvest time and the sun turned harvester in the autumn fields:
Here is the drama of interchange — the retrenching seasons, the recovered events.

Yet we dare to talk of the Jesus as though he alone had passed through the ordeal:
Though I could tell you that the least of the trials of Jesus was the trial of the cross.
I should feel ashamed and sorry for my race if only one or two of its specimens endured the heat and the cold of persecution:
For the road is full of the martyrs who came between and made life easier for the rest:
For the sore feet of the weary came between, and the sad aches of the condemned came between,
And before the eclipsed martyrdoms all the noisy martyrdoms are still:
And thousands of times Jesus has taken the nails out of his palms and himself come off his cross protesting,
But you have put him back again and taken perpetual gifts and laid them there at his sacred shrine.
In death's name life comes between and in life's name death,
And I am humbled seeing how much is made of the little things I have done:
For I am not proof against the slanderer when his flatteries coin my false metal:
Yet I know that I, too, come between — that I pass among men a stream to sunder and join:
Yet I know that where Christs have stood I have stood and will often stand again:
Yet I know that I have taken heavier burdens upon hillsides and seen heaven off my cross:
Yet I know that Jesus, the Christ, and Buddha, the Christ, and Whitman, too, Christ, and the overworked toilers, most benign of Christs, have gone with me to treaty and trial.

This is what it means to come between: this is what we give and take in the exercise of our sacrifice:
This is the meaning of the perpetual ascents and descents of saviors:
This is what comes to the heart in solitude after the wreck of public preparations:
This is what we see when the Christs abdicate and the Christs appear:
This is what honor means to the cross and what it means to the workman's bench:
This is what the dreams of men come to when they appear in splendor on some mountain top and vanishing ignominy in the shadow of some alley:
This is how men and women and children and the animals and the stars come between each other pleading the case of immortality:
This is the straight and crooked of revelation and mystery, crowding to speak the same word:
This is why love ever comes between and reaches out hands to either side:
This is why I think the most of the Christs and the least of the Christs, I who have also my call to serve:
I, on my knees, dusty, sore: I, up in heaven there, cleansed, rejuvenant.