They Did Not Know the Nails

a poem by Roger B. Rueda

They did not know the nails—
my children.
They knew the sound of birds
that sang anyway.
They knew the coins I pressed into their palms
when they begged for sweet dates,
they knew the dust that stuck
to their calves when they ran barefoot
toward the bakery,
they knew how to cry without shame
and sleep without prayer.

They were there—
I swear they were—
at the edge of the crowd,
beneath a wall’s shadow,
my boy with his chipped cup
half-full of goat’s milk,
my girl with the scarf I embroidered with roses,
both watching the sky darken
like a brow furrowed in disappointment.

They did not know what it meant
when the man screamed Eloi, Eloi,
did not understand why the men
with helmets laughed.

But they felt it—
I saw it.

The way her fingers clenched
the bread too tightly,
the way his eyes followed
the shaking knees
of the man on the cross
as if he had seen such tremors
in his grandfather’s body
the night we had no food.

Children do not need
theological terms.
They see what is true
without needing it to be explained.

The guards spat.
The elders smirked.
The women sobbed in that beautiful
controlled collapse of bone and cloth.
But my children—
they just looked.

And they wept
without sound,
as if their bodies remembered
something older than them,
as if they had carried sorrow
in their ribs
long before they were born.

I think the man saw them.
I think, as his blood clung
to his side like a child
afraid of being left behind,
he saw their faces.
And I think it gave him
a reason to stay,
for one more breath.

They did not know
the weight of sin.
But they recognized love
when it was bleeding in public.