Today is Trinity Sunday. It is also June 3, which is the day when both the Anglican and Catholic churches remember the 22 Ugandan Christians who, between 1885 and 1887, were martyred. Many of them were killed on this day in 1886, which was Ascension Thursday that year, burnt for their opposition to the king and their refusal to give up their faith. Today’s poem remembers them. The title comes from the name for God which Charles Lwanga, one of the martyrs, called out before he died.

It was a particularly difficult poem to write, both for the complexity of the subject matter and my feeling of inadequacy in doing justice to martyrdom. I hope the result is of benefit to some.

Kotanda, Kotanda, Kotanda!

(For the Martyrs of Uganda, on Trinity Sunday)

Charles, bearing his agony without a murmur, replied, ‘You poor foolish man! You do not understand what you are saying. You are burning me, but it is as if you were pouring water over my body.’

(John F. Faupel, African Holocaust: The Story of the Uganda Martyrs)

Ascension Thursday:

Many rose and danced,

Bodies smeared in ochre-red,

Amid the sound of beating drums

And voices in their circling chant:

The women who have borne children shall weep

Today they will weep. Yes, they shall weep.

Ascension Thursday:
The flames rose up and danced;

The martyrs sang, embraced each other,

They who soon would overcome,

Shocking those who watched and frowned:

Do they not think they will die?

Do they have no fear of fire?

Ascension Thursday:

The sacrifice prepared.

Taunting, guilt brushed off in cries:

It is not we who kill you.

Nende kills, Mukasa kills,

Kibuka whom you despised kills;

Much blood to please three angry gods.

Ascension Thursday:

Charles Lwanga leads the throng,

Joyful in their union and

The time of union soon to come,

Pities his mockers who would burn

His body yet can but pour

Water and usher in new birth.

Ascension Thursday:

The flames, in anger, rise and rise.

Charles Lwanga, dying, cries

To his God: Kotanda! cries

The first of many; the first

To lead the way, now silent,

Now patiently awaiting, dies.

Ascension Thursday:

The Spirit in the martyrs cries,

Abba! Father! Cries and cries

The cry of desperate sonship to

The only one to save from fire,

The cry within of Holy Fire,

The anger of a righteous God.

Ascension Thursday:

The Son of God rises

And takes His place upon the throne,

To depose the pagan king

And free from flame His holy ones,

Who, suffering, now are one with Him.

Who now from dying with Him rise.

I, Justin, the son of Priscus and grandson of Bacchius, natives of Flavia Neapolis in Palestine, present this address and petition in behalf of those of all nations who are unjustly hated and wantonly abused, myself being one of them.

(Justin Martyr, The First Apology of Justin, trans. James Donaldson and Alexander Roberts)

Some faced what I cannot bear to know:

Crosses, beheadings, Colosseum games;

The sport of the powerful and scared,

They longed for a city for strangers such as they;

I hide where they led.

And Justin, the philosopher of Palestine, pled

With reasoning heads and unopened hearts.

Impassioned in his plea

For their reason to trump passion,

He reasoned till he bled;

And I, on the sidelines,

Hold their coats and avoid their eyes

While he holds us spellbound with his call to the truth,

Crying for mercy but strong when denied:

He knew whom he trusted;

So Justin’s eyes stare firmly where

Mine dart to the ground; he stares down the kings

Who are but false kings, knowing the Kingdom,

And knowing the Truth, which I, in my safety,

Only faintly know.

This week is the Australian Anglican Church’s week of prayer for reconciliation with Australia’s Indigenous people. It isn’t a topic I feel particularly well-equipped to address and am weary of showing up my own ignorance and, shamefully, frequent indifference on the subject. But I figure that that’s where much change happens – with ordinary broken people admitting that they are ordinary and broken but want, by the power and grace of God, to be otherwise. So here is the first in a series of poems that I will be posting, based on the creation stories of Genesis 1-3 and Psalm 103. I hope they are of some benefit.