Theodora

There once was an empress, Theodora
Whose subjects began to bore her
          They were too much at home
          In the old Hippodrome
So she killed ‘em - they’re pushing up flora.

Everybody honors Th’ Workin’ Man
With songs about the dignity of work
Poems, impassioned speeches in Congress
The latest book about worker housing

But everybody ignores that working man
Who builds the stage on which the singer sings
The plumber who makes the artist’s royal flush
The electrician who wires the elections

Everybody honors Th’ Workin’ Man -
But nobody honors a working man

For Isaac Babel

Babel, you hated Russian, Pole, and Jew
You wrote as you were told, in ink all Red
You wrote the same old bigotry, nothing new
In gratitude dear Stalin shot you dead

The homeowner:

“O should we warn your kids that my yard fence
Is now electrified against possums
And foul raccoons most pestiferous?”

The stepfather:

                                                                     “No.”

From Le Chansons de Volga File Clerks Rouge
© 1962 by Les Chansons, Leningrad

O sing a song of reproduction
Accomplished by electrical induction
As workers’ hands insert the paper
Deep into the magic vapor
Chanting without a fuss or stink,
“Yo, **, ** and a bottle of ink!”
Ions charge the chemical toner
Unless there’s none, ‘cause it’s all goner
Or even worse – if there’s a jam
And then the worker yells out (“Goodness!”)
But with a wrench and a mighty shout
Like that ol’ Czar, the jam is OUT
The Committee decrees a Print Command
This is their red-star’red demand
And out comes the paper, newly free
Fresh from a cartridge in a… (There! See?)
By Good Comrade Worker, Ivan-on-the-Spot
Alas, the message is for him to be…

                                                            ­         shot

A drive-in fast-foodery advertises
Its golly-gee new signature cheeseburger
But what in 'burgers does “signature” mean?
Who signs a cheeseburger, and how, and why?

Maybe…

The Artist Known as Nihil composes his
Signature cheeseburger, customized for you,
While waiting for his big break in Vegas
And then he’ll show all you little people

But for now he needs to sign your cheeseburger:
“To Customer 362,
                                   Best Wishes,
                                                            Nihi­l”

Does this machine **** Fascists?  Probably not
Unless it bores them to a yawning death
Through soporific clichés crudely imposed
Upon a few poor, battered chords that twang
Like the barbed wire of an Arctic gulag
Where happy comrades
          Shiver in the snow
          Wither in the wind
          Starve on slops
          Burn with typhus
          Rot in the tundra
As they build the future upon mass graves
While the anti-Fascist cashes his checks

These hours are not The Age of Trump, oh, no
Nor yet the age of McDonald’s arches
Turned upside down like pendant parts spilt from
The four-color process of a ******* mag

All time is God’s, and as a gift to you
May be employed in work and play as you
Think best in gratitude for all the light
That falls upon your acts, your arts, your loves

Whatever else, this is an age of you
In quest for the good, the beautiful, and
                                                        the true

Little men arguing in shabby rooms
Meetings, manifestos, revolvers, bombs
Informers, spies, social organization
Speeches, minutes, dues, What is to be Done?
The great cause of the Proletariat
Greetings from our good comrades in Smolensk
Nihilism, committees, secrecy
The thirst for culture is aristocratic
Nihilism is the only art of the people
Rumors, whispers, clandestine magazines
The unification of workers and peasants
Resolutions passed in the factory soviet
Clenched fists to reject the personal life
Electrification and equality
Cigarettes, *****, the people’s justice
Against the parasitical bourgeoisie
Solidarity to destroy the kulaks
His poetry reeks of sentimentality
Self-centered intellectual decadence
The people’s will for the people’s party
Education for the twentieth century
Lift high the red banner,
                                                fill full the graves

The Futility of the Coccolithophores

In a careless moment, much to my grief
I lost the heritage of millions dead
And much like an unconscionable thief
Considered my atrocities, and fled

In reefs and shoals they lived, they worked, they died
From ancient times, and even until now
In patience layering their art with pride
Each tiny home and funereal how

Not even in their ruins can they now talk
Because I dropped and broke them – goodbye, chalk!

Grandfather’s Saint George medal – hide it first
The ikon of Saint Seraphim – that’s next
Babushka’s crucifix – O, how she loved it
The picture of the Czar – away! Away!

Do not betray your thoughts – a careless word
A smile not authorized, a memory
A fragment from a cheerful Christmas song:
These do not advance The Revolution

Beneath our Brave Red Star they must lie hidden
While our dear comrades love and watch us all

(smells kinda funny in here)

Words:

Behold the Lamb of God, Exit, Please turn
The air-conditioner off, NO SMOKING PLEASE
One, Holy, Catholic, Apostolic
Nicene Creed, 6th Grade Classroom, On this Rock

Things:

Crucifix, thermostat, coffee machine
American flag in a flower vase
Clock, napkins, chairs, a misplaced plastic fork
And folding tables unfolded to the light

Sounds:

A choir of refrigerators out of tune
With each other, and with Ordinary Time

Futurism acknowledges the past
But only to condemn it, discard it:
A song that was sung sweetly yesterday
By a pretty girl while driving to work

A baby laughing at a butterfly
A beagle pup chasing a rubber ball
Geese honking through their autumn pilgrimage
And former people who would not adapt

Reflecting on the mass graves it has filled
Futurism acknowledges its past

For Yue **** Yidhna
And All Who Brew Morning Poetry  for the World

You are neither barista nor priestess
Even though perhaps a little bit of both
You do not serve either McDonald or Tim
But rather the supplicants who approach

Who plead with you to offer them the Cup
Of transient peace and hope in this sad world
A layered paper chalice wherein is borne
Colombian savour, healing and warm

And it is from your hands that they receive
A special blessing, and strength for their day

Upon reading the poems of Anna Ahkmatova

…….. are most useful things; they hide
One’s thoughts from the …….. ………
Who search and sniff each line for any whiff
Of ………, ……….., or …..

Since …… …… in their arrogance,
…………. who forget their place
Will scribble heresies and call it art
But like to hide their plots in lots of dots

Say what you will (but you’d better not):
…….. are most useful things; they hide.

A small child asked another.  An old man turned
To wonder about a question he had never heard
How does one lend a finger? But then he saw:
A fingerprint to open a little ‘phone

For children borrow from each other’s lives, and joy
In all the little daily ceremonies
Of childhood, giggling over telescreens
And, too, their hopes and dreams and ice-cream cones

A finger now a child may lend or borrow
And, as always, maybe his heart tomorrow

Did Mitya escape to America?
He might have changed his name to Bob or Al
Married Myrtle in the Methodist Church -
Myrtle, nee’ Agrafena Alexandrovna –

And worked the candy counter at Woolworth’s
Riding the trolley downtown every day
While saving up for a new Model T
In obedience to his New World staretz

Horatio Alger hissing behind a tree:
Was Mitya sentenced to America?

She took an oath to defend the Constitution
But no one seemed to have taken an oath
                                                                ­             to defend her


(Now back to the Gridiron Dinner)

Though some maintain that parallels don’t meet
And three-point-something is the sum of pi
And whether X is found; no one knows why
(Was it lost, perhaps wandering in the street?)

Curious matters all Euclidian
Even for the bold mathematician
Are as obdurate as obsidian
Each an illogical proposition  

To the rationalist impossible, and yet -
Parallel lines are at the Altar met

“…schools, as soft targets, need to be fortified”
-the sheriff of Broward County

Perhaps we are Essenes in the desert
Or Sicarii fortifying Masada
A civilization fragmented, lost
Confused and lost, withering, withdrawing

We are in any event determined
To save something against the future time
Anything – so that men may pray again -
A rosary, an anthology of Keats

Deep in the dust deep in a cave upon a hill
While in the plain below dark armies drill

For Eugenio Corti

Perhaps the site is now a garbage heap
A parking lot, a drainage ditch, a field
Where little children chase a soccer ball
Among the flowers of a Russian spring

Whispering a memory of Italy
For here a poor Italian soldier died
His life ripped from him in a desolation
Of screams and violence and frozen horror:

But he is a candle, lit again, in Heaven where
His feet are always warm, and “Savoia!” is a hymn

The Superintendent Speaks:

It’s for the children transparency
Because children are our most important
Resource we need to put this behind us
The children come first the healing process
Needs to begin the best interests of the children
Because we’re a team focus on the children
Distractions it’s all about the children
We need to move forward because we’re a family

He and his attorneys could not immediately
*Be reached for comment for the children

Young Karamazov – once upon a time
Strolled dreaming through the happy hopes of youth
And surely wondered about spring and love
Wrote clumsy verse, perhaps, for a pretty girl

Then fell unfortunately into fashion:
The acquisition of proud vanities
Through the disposition of dreams and souls
Until he was only an old man who

Sat brooding through the bitter schemes of age
Old Karamazov – lost upon a time

The plans for your construction are precise
The design and engineering are true
The foundations solid, the drains are laid
In mathematics pure, infallible

The offices are bright with light, well-aired
The flow of work geometrically set
The shops and stores convenient to the staff
In tactical practicalities placed

But do you wonder, at night beneath your lamp -
Why are you building a concentration camp?

“I consecrate you to a great novitiate in the world.”

-Father Zosima to Alyosha in The Brothers Karamazov

The monastery gate opens easily
If it really needs opening at all
The road outside also leads somewhere else
But then it just as often leads back again

The distance measured by a crucifix
Where a weary traveler can pray awhile
Or maybe Harry Bailey’s 1 hamburger joint
A cup of coffee and a cigarette

Offered by a pilgrim in the neon night -
The monastery gate opens easily



1 *The Canterbury Tales

No, no, not your teacher of high-school maths
But an animal so tiny it doesn’t belong
In this harsh world; rather in a fairyland
To live among our childhood imaginings

With spectacles upon its handsome nose
And tiny, delicate, artistic paws
And a fine grey coat, it looks exactly like
A little old man at home with his books

Dozing, dreaming beside his little fire
And never working out the sum of pi

The Brothers Karamazov, Book II

There was little news from Russia today
At Optina the midday liturgy
Was over around eleven or so
The faithful crossing themselves as they left

Mostly poor folk, walking to their homes for lunch
And then back to work.  They hardly noticed
A party of their betters strolling about
Reading tombstones, giggling about the quaint monks

Waiting to see a reed swaying in the wind
There was little news from Russia today

Green Chemicals Against the Evil U.R.I.

Mercy in green, green chemicals in green
Labeled with a catalogue of cautions
One desperately ignores in desperate quest
For a cessation of foul miseries:

The red, inflam’ed throat that censors speech
Fevers fogging over the ways of the mind
Agues arguing against those motions of the limbs
That other times do joy in youth and health

But…coffee next Friday morning you ask?
Yes, yes - I hope to be alive by then

For Anna Akhmatova

Oh, we have strolled the winter avenues
Of the great Czar’s queen city of the North
And argued about Pushkin, over tea,
Great cups of tea in noisy little shops

Where at each table sat a poet or two
With pocket-wrinkled sheets of wild new verse
Set out like armies in desperate defense
Of the holy soil of the Motherland

Yes, we have strolled along the frozen Neva
In dream-bearing Aurora’s sacred light

He said that when he came home from the war
He thoughtfully packed all his uniforms
Into his good ol’ Marine Corps sea bag
Took it out to the back yard
                                               and burned it

Come, little book, companion of lost youth
Well met at Tien Sha in the long ago
A comrade through the days of gasping heat
A comrade through the nights of flare-lit death

And then

A comrade through life’s lingering after-years
That often seemed only a falling away
From that not time which was lost in not time
The fallenness of man and men and time

O little book that steadies the universe
Where are you now – not lost out of not time?



Too much exposition:

At a Pacific Stars & Stripes book stall in Viet-Nam I bought a Modern Library edition of The Brothers Karamazov which I stowed away with my gear and on which I read a little; I was much more into Tolkien. In the event, more than a year later (I was in-country 18 months) I opened that book aboard a Pan American 707, but was so grateful to be alive and so physically sick that I never read more than a page or so.  I didn’t finish the book until years later, but have re-read it several times since.  

Somehow I have lost it, and although my wonderful daughter gave me a replacement (in larger print), I so miss that companion of the long-ago.

Bring me a poem.  You can find them anywhere –
In the Aer Lingus, sitting next to you
And sometimes scattered among the summer leaves
Misplaced in gutters or floating in the air

Strolling along Bachelors’ Walk, or maybe
Adrift upon the Liffey-water, where once
The gunboats roared like dinosaurs, their years
Passing like smoke, like burning, falling walls

Poems everywhere –

Beside the fire, drinking a cup of tea
Or talking with a friend – poems everywhere!

Dostoyevsky’s House of the Dead


In shackles of shame and under the rod
Our brothers lie upon the Russian earth
In penance suffering for the sins of all
Their common cell is floored with filth and mud
Their common bed a shelf of planks and fleas
Their common air befouled with stench and pain
Their several labors in the heat and cold
That blow the seasons lost across the steppes
Exhaust their limbs and cruelly tease their eyes
With river-visions of what might have been
For them there is no hope within this world

And yet

At drumbeat-dawn there is hardly a man
Who does not kneel before the ikons nailed
As surely to the wall as convicts’ sins
Are nailed with Jesus to the shameful Cross
And take that Cross unto himself in depths
Of degradation and despair that bless
The bad thief first, and even so, the good

Some ‘bloggers have ‘blogged thus:

All teachers trample the Constitution
All teachers promote contempt for the Flag
All teachers should be in an institution
All teachers are weird (and that one’s a f*g)
All teachers despise the military
All teachers should be slowly microwaved
All teachers hate meat; they’re vegetary
All teachers hate Jesus; they can’t be Saved
All teachers are evil; the children are harmed

And now they ‘blog: All teachers should be armed!

For Tod on his Birthday

A coastal lugger wallows in the waves
Almost adrift in its poor steerageway
Slow-yawing northeast from the blue Aegean
Into the soft-murmuring Marmara.
Athens is in the past, and soon, ahead,
Constantinople’s walls will catch the dawn.
Our sticks, our packs, a space upon the deck
A book of verse, a cup, a spoon, a bowl,
Some prayers the priest was pleased to copy out
For us poor pilgrims who with weary feet
Were pleased to board a northbound boat at last
And rest through sunlit days with pipes alight
And words and prayers afloat among the sails,
Among the gulls that circle ‘round the mast.
All travelers pray for their hearts’ desires
To wait for them ashore at journey’s end;
For us, ours is to serve the Emperor -
A little further, there beyond the stars.

Interstate Ten before it was an interstate
Arrowing west to California, one lane
That way and one lane this way; one way west
And one way back again
                                                    admitting defeat

In the desert a rest stop. Desperate trees.
They seemed as desperate as a pilgrim
Lost in his going somewhere, and they
Weren’t going anywhere among the dunes

They said to one pilgrim, “Whatever dream
You’re living – it might not work out, okay?

Music Download on the Roof* –
A New Musical

“Rabbi, is there a blessing for the Czar?”

“A blessing for the Czar? – yes, on my ‘blog…”

YOU HAVE NOT YET SUBSCRIBED TO THIS SITE ERROR 401 RETRY BLURK SERVER UNAVAILABLE ERROR 401 NOT FOUND YOU HAVE READ YOUR THREE FREE ESSAYS FOR THE MONTH SYSTEM ERROR

Lefttard fascist libtard Russian troll loony mother * *er freaks stupid idiotic childish rant Antifa **** troll comrade idiots like you tide pod generation snowflakes * you Marxist serial felon MSM useful idiots street justice fanboy alt.right * dunal trumpf lunatic leftist *phile ** * in your * your ****** loser freak pos pack heat ammosexuals smh screwball lefties community organizers trumptards professional agitators if we could ban idiots like you you donkey *s you lying * comrade Lefttard fascist libtard Russian troll loony mother * *er freaks stupid idiotic childish rant Antifa **** troll comrade idiots like you tide pod generation snowflakes * you Marxist serial felon MSM useful idiots street justice fanboy alt.right culy dunal trumpf lunatic leftist *phile ** * in your * your ****** loser freak pos pack heat ammosexuals smh screwball lefties community organizers trumptards professional agitators if we could ban idiots like you you donkey *s you lying * comrade Lefttard fascist libtard Russian troll loony mother * *er freaks stupid idiotic childish rant Antifa **** troll comrade idiots like you tide pod generation snowflakes * you Marxist serial felon MSM useful idiots street justice fanboy alt.right culy dunal trumpf lunatic leftist *phile ** * in your * your ****** loser freak pos pack heat ammosexuals smh screwball lefties community organizers trumptards professional agitators if we could ban idiots like you you donkey *s you lying * comrade Lefttard fascist libtard Russian troll loony mother * *er freaks stupid idiotic childish rant Antifa **** troll comrade idiots like you tide pod generation snowflakes * you Marxist serial felon MSM useful idiots street justice fanboy alt.right culy dunal trumpf lunatic leftist *phile ** * in your * your ****** loser freak pos pack heat ammosexuals smh screwball lefties community organizers trumptards professional agitators if we could ban idiots like you you donkey *s you lying ** comrade

*Employ all caps and strings of exclamation marks ad lib

“See all those workers digging through that hill?”
The carter asked, there pointing with his whip
While two mismatched old horses lumbered on
Jerking carter and prisoners along the ruts.

An empty church, its now skeletal dome
Open to the dusk, lay somewhat in the way
Of where the rails would lay, just there among
Stray stalks of wheat, from lost and windblown seeds.

One prisoner yawning through his sorrows said
“I wonder why the Czar didn’t send me there
To carve with pick and shovel and barrow and hod
His new technology across the steppes.”

“Too close to Petersburg, and Moscow too,
My lad.  The Czar wants you to labor far,
Far off.  No mischief from you and your books,
Your poems, your nasty little magazines.”

“Oh, carter, is Pushkin unknown to you?
Turgenev, Gogol, Dostoyevsky too?
What stories do you tell your children, then?
Do you teach them to love their Russian letters?”

The carter laughed; he lit his pipe and said
“You intellectuals!  Living in the past!
Education for the 19th century -
That’s what our children need, not your old books.”

“Someday,” the carter mused, “railways everywhere,
And steel will take you where you will be sent.
Electric light will make midday of night
And Russia’s soul will be great big machines!”

“Machines, and louder guns, and better clocks -
All these will make for better men, you’ll see.
You young fellows will live to see it; I won’t,
But what a happy land your Russia will be!”

And the cart rattled on, the horses tired,
Longing for the day’s end, and hay, and rest;
The prisoners made old jokes in laughing rhymes,
Begged ‘baccy from the carter, and wondered.

Saint Robert Southwell (not a catchy title; I'll work on it...)

+21 February 1595

Without you

Our souls, like looted chapels, lie in heaps
While still Our Lady of Walsingham weeps

On Reading Crime and Punishment

Old Moby **** is a right good whale
He really knows how to end a tale
                                           With his tail!
When tedious men give the reader fits
Moby splashes, and dashes ‘em to bits.
But in Saint Petersburg – or Petrograd –
Rodian keeps talking, and that’s too bad,
All about his woes, and his sinful fall;
Alas!  There is no whale to end it all.


(Postscript – I finally finished C & P.  As always with Dostoyevsky, the journey ended in hope)

Gossamer is that
Substance which is excreted
From a spider’s *ss.

Lost in a remote province of the mind
A youth attends to the cheap gramophone
Again: On the Steppes of Central Asia,
A recording by a mill town orchestra
Of no repute.  But it is magic still:
While washing his face and dressing for work
In a clean, pressed uniform of defeat,
For ten glorious minutes he is not
A function, a shop-soiled proletarian
Of no repute.  Beyond the landlord’s window,
Beyond the power lines and the ***-holed street,
He searches dawn’s horizons with wary eyes
For wild and wily Tartars, horsemen out
To blood the caravans for glory and gold.
A youth greets the day as he truly is:
A cavalryman, a soldier of the Czar,
Whose uniform is bright with victory.

A pompous pine lives down the road, a tree
So well aware of his own dignity;
I speak to him on evening walks, and he,
He nods a centimeter in courtesy

Imagine slaves buying their chains
Proudly bragging about their chains
Prettily decorating their chains
Gloriously celebrating their chains
And accessorizing their chains

Waiting patiently in long queues
All lined up by ones and by twos
Uniform in their chemical shoes
Beast-marked with their camp tattoos
Obedient to the latest news

Desperate for the latest ‘phone
Desperate never to be alone
Desperate for approval shown
Desperate for a cool ring tone
Desperate not to be unknown

For Danielle and Sarah, school librarians

Criss-cross, applesauce
This is how we read
Hey, hey, library day –
Books are all I need!

Criss-cross, applesauce
Sit with me a while
Right here, on the floor
How I like your smile!

Criss-cross, applesauce
Suddenly afraid
Doors locked, windows blocked
By a flimsy shade

Criss-cross, applesauce
Hiding in the gloom
Lights out, fear and doubt
In this silent room

Criss-cross, applesauce
How does childhood die?
Hush, hush! In the dark
Everything’s a lie

-from Paleo-Hippies at Work and Play, 2014. Available from amazon.com.

This is neither history nor theology;
this is Romance:

                                       A Liturgy for the Emperor

In memory of
Patrick Joseph Donovan,
Stratiotis

Processional

How, then, will we find death?  With rifle in hand,
Perhaps, or flowing with the warm, worn prayers
That slip with beads through one's fingers and soul.
Rifle or Rosary, either will do.
One's death might rise in the boldness of youth,
Or in the wearied wisdom of old age,
In wild combat against ancient evils,
Or softly, while planting a red-apple tree
For grandchildren to summer-celebrate,
In wild red martyrdom, or obscure white.

The nights still whisper how the Emperor fell,
Fell with a faithful few upon the walls,
The old land walls of Constantinople.
But we are not to speak of martyrs whose
Transcendent beauty reproaches our times,
Our drifting dark age, drab, dreary, and dim
Our tomb-like lives cluttered with small darkness,
Our talk all common, colourless, and cold:
The thoughts assigned programmed into our souls,
Daymares programmed into us for our good,
Pitiful, pattering, prosthetic prose,
Cacophonies of casual cruelties --
No brave iambic lines for golden dreams.

But dare we also whisper truths, and speak
Of what a wind-wild people once we were,
And we will want our syllables to sing
In honour of the Martyr-Emperor
And those who followed him into his death,
And in this knowing of him we can live
Among those souls who are forever young.

Introit

In Nomine Partis, et Filli, et Spiritus Sancti

We will go to the Altar of God
To God, Who gives joy to our youth
We will go to the Altar of God
We will go to Byzantium

Kyrie

Lord have mercy -- when the shadows surround us
Christ have mercy -- when we forget the Three Romes
Lord have mercy -- when we forget You

Gloria

Glory to God in the highest
And peace to His Byzantine people
And all His peoples
Lord God, Heavenly King
who once blessed us with Emperors
Send us another
Send Your waiting people their Emperor

The First Reading

As Constantine his walls he watched, he wept,
Lost in the Gethsemane of his soul
His tears they fell upon the ancient bricks
Warm with centuries of sun, saintliness,
And the passions of a glorious race

The City!  Long reigning on the Golden Horn
The Summer Country of our childhood dreams
There playing, praying, working, selling, and,
Yes, sinning too.  Passionate *Romanoi --
What a magnificent people we were.

(fast)

When armies marched to the Byzantine beat
Sophia ruled from her Byzantine seat  
When Byzantine sails sheltered Odysseus' sea
The wave-roads of trade were open and free  
When Romanoi feasted, blood mixed with wine
Daggers drawn over a dancing concubine
A newer Helen who provoked desire,
She seared men's eyes with her own Greek Fire
When Blues and Greens howled in the Hippodrome --
Such rowdy citizens in Second Rome! --
Then even Emperors in purple shoes
Feared stoning by Greens or hanging by Blues
The rough, loud democracy of the street --
Mobs also marched to the Byzantine beat

The Second Reading

(slowly)

But –

Above all rose Justinian's gem
The holy place where God called us to Him
The Mother Church of dawn-lit Christendom
Sophia -- the Queen of Byzantium
Where Patriarch, patrician, people, and priest
Gave worship.  Then the greatest and the least
Abandoned sin to hear the sweet bells ring,
Stood penitent before our God, our King:
In consecrated hands, through wine and bread

Christos Pantocrater fed us Himself

And then all hearts were cleansed, all souls were fed

(Very slowly)

But centuries passed, and this City of God
Heart of the Empire, became the Empire,
As lands and peoples were lost forever
to the creeping new age.  When Constantine,
The last Constantine, was called to the Throne,
All that was left was The City herself,
The Morea, and islands, and memories.
The fleet whose sails had shaded the Inner Sea
Was but a few hopeless hulks in the Horn

From the dust, dark shadows metastasized,
Shadows who stole and slew their way to power
And swept the land bare of free folk and fields
And more and more the shadows grasped and held,
A dead world of slaves whose backs were bloodied
Beneath the whips of masters, slaves whose eyes
Were cast carefully, cautiously to the ground
Lest demeanour manly and bearing proud
Attract the executioners' busy blades.

Finally, after devouring lands and souls,
The shadows coveted Constantinople,
The Red-Apple Tree where continents meet,
The City they could never build for themselves
And nothing stood between them and their lust
But one bold man: Constantine Dragases.
The faithful few who stood the walls with him,
Gathered around proud, stubborn Constantine:
Workers and monks and nuns, beggars, merchants,
Proud, arrogant Byzantines, and the few
Wild Latins From the barbarian West
Whose Greek was in their hearts, not on their lips,
Who gave their loyalty late to their liege lord,
The Emperor, who could have safely lain
A shadow's golden-caged slave, obedient,
Well-fed, well-bedded from the shadows'
Catalogues of pretty girls and prettier boys,
A memory of what had been a man.

But Constantine stood proudly on his walls,
Defiantly, bravely, sadly there on
His crumbling ancient walls, and gave his faith
To God and the City, to his people,
Even to the faithless ones, even to his death.

And others came, From Rome and Spain and France,
From Germany, and even from the Turks,
Brave, lonely men with reasons of their own
For ending their lives there on the Land Walls.

But they were not enough.  And late that night,
After the last Mass in Hagia Sophia,
The Emperor knew that his was the blood,
The blood of sacrifice that would be shed
In remembrance of ****** Golgotha,
For the people he was given to rule,
For the people for whom he chose to die,
Sheltering, protecting, until his end.


A Gospel

No angel appeared to the Emperor,
No voice of God from a burning bush
He parted himself from his followers
And for a few minutes grieved alone

And this was given Constantine to know:

The eternal Constantinople is
Never to be lost, never defeated --
In every Christian flows Dragases' blood
Every village is the Holy City
Every church is Hagia Sophia
Every prayer is a Mass for the Emperor
Every children's foot-race the Hippodrome
Every poor family's poor supper
A banquet under the Red-Apple Tree.
Constantinople will live forever.
Know that, and, laughing, give your last earth-hour,
And your joyful eternity, to God.

Credo

We believe in God's holy empire too,
Byzantium, eternally golden
The Red-Apple Tree in the eastern sun
The City that echoes with laughing light
Through memory and history and beyond.
We believe in God and His Emperor,
And we believe that in the absence of
The Emperor, even then we must be
The Emperor's subjects, stubborn and true,
Wherever God has chosen to send us.
We then must rule our passions and our hearts,
Tend our gardens as if they were Eden --
Because they are -- and care for our children
As if angels were visiting tonight,
Until our God restores our Emperor,
Restores His City where the Earth-halves meet,
And finally, some day, some happy day,
Returns Himself to sit and rule enthroned
In His Three Romes, and in Jerusalem.


Communion

Constantine shook himself, and gave commands,
Commending all to duty and to God.
Above him the dome of Hagia Sophia
Glowed eerily on that last, wild night
While lightning slashed among the sliding clouds
Byzantium rose again for one glorious hour
And the world marveled that such things could be,
That Christ and Rome and Constantinople
Could be found in one man at the end of an age.

Blood, *****, screams, and death;
blood, *****, death
Blood, *****, screams, and death;
blood, *****, screams
Blood, *****, screams, and death;
blood, *****, death
Blood, *****, screams, and death;
blood, *****, screams
The glory is that there is no glory.
Chaos.  Horror.  Stench.  Sweat.  Pain.  *****.  Death.
Hi­s -- His -- body broken again for us.

On that dark morning of a dark new age,
Constantine turned and faced its slithering shadows
With a Byzantine end to his ruler's art,
With the peace of Christ and a hero's heart.

DISMISSAL

The Mass is ended.  Byzantium is ended.  
Escape, if you can -- make Byzantium live.
Escape to live in some peace, if you can.
Escape in peace to love and serve in exile.
Escape in peace to love and serve the Lord.

"O Lord save Thy people and bless Thine inheritance;
And to Thy Faithful king grant victory over the barbarians.
And by the power of Thy Cross, protect all those who follow  
          Thee"1

Not an End at All

1Troparion for the Sunday of the Elevation of the Cross, Divine Prayers and Serves of the Catholic Orthodox Church of Christ, copyright 1938.

Many thanks to Mr. Tod Mixson and others of St. Michael's Orthodox Church for assistance at many points, both liturgical and artistic, to Dr. Dan Bailey, of happy memory, and Dr. John Dahmus of Stephen F. Austin State University.

Our thoughts and prayers are with you our thoughts and
Prayers are with you our thoughts and prayers are with
You our thoughts and prayers are with you our thoughts
and prayers are with you our thoughts and prayers are

With you our thoughts and prayers are with you our
Thoughts and prayers are with you our thoughts and prayers
Are with you our thoughts and prayers are with you
Our thoughts and prayers are with you our thoughts and

Prayers are with you our thoughts and prayers are with…
What thoughts? And what does any of that mean?

Love lost along abandoned railway lines,
Grave-cold, grave-still, grave-dark beneath dead snow,
A thousand miles of ashes, corpses, ghosts -
Sacrarium of a martyred civilization.

A silent wolf pads west across the ice,
The rotting remnant of a young man’s arm,
Slung casually between its pale pink jaws -
A cufflink clings to a bit of ragged cloth.

Above the wolf, the ice, the arm, the link
A dead star hangs, dead in a moonless sky,
It gives no light, there is no life; a mist
Arises from the clotted, haunted earth.

For generations the seasons are lies,
Since neither love nor life is free to sing
The eternal hymns of long-forbidden spring -
And yet beneath the lies the old world gasps

The old world gasps in sudden ecstasy
A whispered resurrection of the truth
As tender stems ascend and push the stones
Aside, away into irrelevance.

And now the sunflowers laugh with the sun
Like merry young lads in their happy youth
Coaxing an ox-team into the fields,
Showing off their muscles to merry young girls.

The men of steel are only stains of rust,
Discoloring the seams of broken drains,
As useless as the rotted bits of brass
Turned up sometimes by Uncle Sasha’s plow.

For this is Holy Russia, eternally young;
Over those wide lands her church domes bless the sky,
While Ruslan and Ludmilla bless the earth
With the songs of lovers in God’s ever-spring

A group of journalists arrived from Moscow and were told that the Afghan National Army…had taken the ridge. (They) were posing for victory photographs while our soldiers lay in the morgue.

-Svetlana Alexeivich, *Zinky Boys: Soviet Voices from the Afghanistan War

A touchy old man who never went to war
Now poses with his decorative generals  
In their tailored Ken-and-Barbie battle dress
All prepped for combat in the officers’ club

New president, same as old presidents
And generals, awarding each other medals
And promotions for their golden resumes’
For sending not-their-children off to die

While they prosper on defense industry bids,
Afghanistan is the graveyard of our kids

*Shhhhhhhhhh…Don’t disturb Congress;
they’re fast asleep.