Crucifix

Richard Hoffman:

I confess I’m reluctant to write about this poem. I think it speaks for itself, and as its author I hope that it holds onto a reader longer than it takes to read it, that maybe it sends them back to read it again. I hope it stirs questions — it still holds questions for me: about violence and the fetishization of violence, about trauma and religion, about suffering and the complicated need to understand it, about childhood innocence and its first confrontation with atrocity.

The poem is rooted in a real boyhood experience of violation, after which I ran to the church where I looked up at a broken and bleeding Jesus who seemed to be looking into a distance above and behind me, looking for help himself. But that biographical fact is the least important dimension of the poem, if it is of any importance at all.