About “Eternal Moment on a Calm Palm Sunday Morning,” by John R Adcox:

“Eternal Moment on a Calm Palm Sunday Morning” tells the story, in blank verse, of a mystery, of a wanderer through time who seeks answers to troubling questions.

The poem’s story begins in the nave of an Episcopal church on a calm Palm Sunday morning, where the Passion of Christ, as presented in the Gospel of St. Matthew, is dramatized in the liturgy, with clergy and congregants participating. As the speaker of the poem listens, he finds himself carried—in visions, dreams, and imagination—into the past, caught up in moments of this crucial week as they unfold.

Not merely a narrator or passive observer, he becomes an actor, along with the others standing in the nave, in those awful hours which brought the Savior to His death. The speaker, by no means reverential or pious, instead is something of a knave, one who expresses growing rage toward Christ, not fully certain why this anger is there, even as he almost gleefully surrenders himself to his hostility.

But he is one with a divided mind. As events of the poem transpire, the speaker begins to reflect on his thoughts and actions toward Christ, wondering why he so despises this one who is called a Savior, why he must face even eternal darkness to find the clue to the mystery of his torment. In the nave, on a calm Palm Sunday morning, this knave may find the mystery of redemption solved.