"It is Done."

When the last living thing
has died on account of us,
how poetical it would be
if Earth could say,
in a voice floating up
perhaps
from the floor
of the Grand Canyon,
"It is done."
People did not like it here.

Sound familiar?
I definitely hope so, since we had an in-class writing analysis on it. This is a poem written by Vonnegut titled "Requiem". In my analysis, I wrote entirely on it's relation to Slaughterhouse Five(which is what we were told to do). But later that day, I made another connection with it. This post is going to get a bit religious for I will be speaking about a biblical connection I made, but I'll state now that I do not mean to offend anyone for I will be talking clearly about this religion by itself and not comparing it to any others.

In the Christian religion, we believe that Jesus Christ came to Earth so that he could save us. As the Son of God, we believe he was perfect in every aspect. In relation to the poem, you can say that "the last living thing" is Jesus since he was the only perfect human and his crucifixion was the fault of us(imperfect humans), which is represents the "died on account of us" part of the poem. My second connection that I made from what was given to us was the "It is done" portion of the poem. I immediately thought of a passage in the bible that connected with it: John 19:30, which states, "When he had received the drink, Jesus said, 'It is finished.' With that, he bowed his head and gave up his spirit." Coincidence? I think not. So, I did a bit of research and guess what I found? The entirety of the poem.

Requiem:

The crucified planet Earth,
should it find a voice
and a sense of irony,
might now well say
of our abuse of it,
"Forgive them, Father,
They know not what they do."

The irony would be
that we know what
we are doing.

When the last living thing
has died on account of us,
how poetical it would be
if Earth could say,
in a voice floating up
perhaps
from the floor
of the Grand Canyon,
"It is done."
People did not like it here.

Will you look at that. More biblical references. The very first sentence has the word "crucified" in it, also representing Jesus as Earth. It later says "our abuse of it," which signifies the torture that he went through during his crucifixion and a quote directly from Jesus in the bible, found in Luke 23:34.

So what is Vonnegut trying to convey to us through his poem? Vonnegut wasn't a religious person, present in Slaughterhouse Five through his theme of existentialism. So why write a poem titled "Requiem" which means a mass for a dead person who represents the Christian religion? Here is what I think and can conclude through my research.
Vonnegut wrote a book titled Palm Sunday(ironically it's Palm Sunday today) where he recreated his great-grandfathers funeral address which denied the existence of God. Vonnegut also rejected the divinity of Christ Jesus but as a humanist, admired the Beatitudes that Jesus spoke about in his Sermon on the Mount. Despite being an atheist and not believing in the existence of a higher being and an afterlife, I think Vonnegut wrote this poem as a tribute to Jesus, being an admirer of him and his teachings on human values.