Burned at the Stake

Heretic martyr, chained to the stake, Jan Hus sang
and prayed while a hooded executioner held a torch
to the dry sticks that pricked his feet
and a sober crowd watched, waiting 

for what?  An act of God?  A shriek of pain?  A promise
to recant?  Shadrach’s angel to return
on special assignment?  Or only the grim relief taken 
in another’s’ torment (this time, thank God, someone else’s turn)?

The mystery of faith baffles the reasoning 
mind, the lively maze of sensing nerves, 
rushing glands and beating brain. Pain 
foreseen hardens muscles into armor, charges 

the arteries and lets some wild thing loose
in the only animal able to imagine 
its own death or amplify its suffering 
with possibility. Did he wonder, I wonder,

what would come first–suffocation by smoke
or the searing lick of flame on fingers held
the night before to the candle and pulled back?
Did the loud prayer cried into the brutal

wind for mercy on his judges distract his ears
from the sizzling of his sweat drops in the fire?
I remember how, as children, we fed each other’s morbid
fascination: “If you could choose, how would you die?”

We never allowed the peaceful midnight passing,
the gentle slumbering final breath, but listed 
awful choices: hanging, beheading, drowning, falling
from great heights, lingering sickness, bullets to the heart.

Burning was the worst. The martyrs burned
at the stake stopped me, stop me still, to try to fathom
unfathomable faith and call to mind 
another childhood ritual tempting the finite

mind to defy its finitude:  “How much do you love me?”
And always the only answer that served mocked
the question even as it reassured, with arms spread wide
but never wide enough: “This much.”