The Headless Jesus
by Theodora Goss

There was a tomb in the Fiume Road Cemetery
in Budapest, on which a headless Jesus sat
between two angels holding up their arms
to Heaven as though they too were wondering
where his stone head had gone. No doubt
someone had stolen it sometime in the last century,
perhaps in the infamous 1970s
when these sorts of things would happen
(it was a godless age), and now his head was sitting
in an antique shop or perhaps in someone’s library
as an example of nineteenth-century stonework,
looking up with its compassionate stone eyes
at an electric light bulb, vaguely remembering the sky
it had once watched, the movement of clouds,
the feel of rain on its stone cheeks, the rustle of wind
in the leaves of the sycamore trees, and the crows,
black and gray like an order of monks,
that would perch on the stone wall above, cawing
about something important, probably politics —
missing the sooty air of Budapest
and the sound of trams along Fiume Road
and the company of its stone angels.

(The image is Head of Christ by an unknown sculptor.)