The poem had more than one message. "Crucified" is part of a collection of poems by Gibran "The Madman". Khalil Gibran was a great fan of Jesus Christ and celebrated him in many works including The Prophet. This poem, like many works of Gibran, is a celebration of the strength and eternal goodness of Christ, and a lampoon of our human hypocrisy.
Substantially, it was Gibran's way of lampooning us
humans for hypocrisy. We celebrate the death of Christ on Good Friday and put up showy ceremonies only to go home and forget about him.
Listen to this from Gibran about the good Friday:
Today, the Christian souls ride on the wing of memories
and fly to Jerusalem. There they will stand in throngs,
beating upon their bosoms, and staring at Him, crowned
with a wreath of thorns, stretching His arms before
heaven, and looking from behind the veil of Death into the
depths of Life....
But when the curtain of night drops over the stage of the
day and the brief drama is concluded, the Christians will
go back in groups and lie down in the shadow of oblivion
between the quilts of ignorance and slothfulness.
This comment also confirms Gibran's disdain for our hypocrisy and showiness with no genuine substance:
Jesus came not from the heart of the circle of Light to
destroy the homes and build upon their ruins the
convents and monasteries.
The dialog with the crowd was a mockery of their hypocrisy of showing concern but not stopping the evil about to happen as they saw it.
- Gibrain was also celebrating Jesus strength but not in the way conventional Christian thinking sees it. He sees the death of Jesus as not a weakness or victimhood of a good one by the wicked, but a triumphant damning of the wicked by one who had completed a mission and was leaving anyway.
This excerpt from Gibrain tells it all:
Humanity looks upon Jesus the Nazarene as a poor-born
who suffered misery and humiliation with all of the weak.
And He is pitied, for Humanity believes He was crucified
painfully.... And all that Humanity offers to Him is crying
and wailing and lamentation. For centuries Humanity has
been worshipping weakness in the person of the Saviour.
The Nazarene was not weak! He was strong and is
strong! But the people refuse to heed the true meaning of
strength.
The Nazarene was not weak! He was strong and is
strong! But the people refuse to heed the true meaning of
strength. . . He lived as a leader: He was crucified as a
crusader; He died with a heroism that frightened His
killers and tormentors. He was not a bird with broken
wings; He was a raging tempest who broke all crooked
wings.
He feared not His persecutors nor His enemies. He
suffered not before His killers. Free and brave and daring
He was. He defied all despots and oppressors. He saw
the contagious pustules and amputated them.... He
muted Evil and He crushed Falsehood and He choked
Treachery.
- To him, Jesus was one of a continuous stream in time, of good spirits God sent as messengers to clean up a corrupt world and when done return back home to the better, eternal realm. This is a common belief in the Jew/Arab cultures from which Gibran comes. Gibran is from Lebanon, migrated to America with family in the 1800s. To him Jesus was not a victim of a wicked system but one of many messengers of God who came to deliver the good news for betterment of mankind but always get victimized by foolish mankind.
Jesus had done his job and it was time to go back home and that's it. So his death by whatever means was not to be judged by human standards of victimisation. It is not an atonement, sacrifice or our banal need to be praised! Listen to the last two lines of the poem you quoted:
“And now I go as others already crucified have gone. And
think not we are weary of crucifixion. For we must be
crucified by larger and yet larger men, between greater
earths and greater heavens."
The import of all this is: the crucifixion is not to be taken in the carnal, ordinary, banal sense we humans have ascribed to it. It was a much more deeply fundamental phenomenon with a meaning far deeper than we mere canal, banal humans can comprehend. The ultimate message here is: the son of man is better, greater than we think!
You can get the full text of Gibran's comment on "The crucified (written on Good Friday)" in the blogpost the crucified (written on good friday) - kahlil gibran.