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.

Tessitura, psalms, and songs of praise, they branded atheism when singing Christian psalms in the streets making ineffable groans, where the exordios looked from the back with Delphic prose, where the dart that opens the curtains of the hallelujah tormented, with darts that rubbed weathered in the tentative to rise of the stores of Sanequerib. They are relatives of Incipit Psalm 69. " Saint John said as they continued to climb the Calvary of Profitis Ilias, but this time in the company of the Help of Isaiah, with a great spirit of being from the cavern of Elías in Haifa, at a flat point at the time of the Benedictus. Already the Assyrians were returning the same way they came, as Isaiah prophesied, in the morning with ejaculations that ended with the crass rottenness that could end the day without a step other than an anti-Jesuit one. Prayers go and implore the Omnia Vanitatis, the moment when the sun honors, taking you towards the close of the day with the perpetual antiphon. The vigil was reaching the lines of Isaiah does not rest, in Trinitarian doxology. Where is the darkness, where is the glory to see you...? If the stars collide with each other in Baptismal frowning, and in the mystery of Vernarth that lies a complex, tied to becoming that never begins, and what was Christic history of a morning introit.

Saint John the Apostle and Vernarth express in the Trinitarian doxology: “Through Christ, with him and in him, to you Almighty God the Father, in the unity of the Holy Spirit, all honor and all glory, forever and ever. Amen"

The triangular taxias of the Hetairoi made faunas that came cutting themselves with the wind of the "incipit" of Psalm 69: "My God, come to my aid;" Lord, hurry to help me ", by the Keras or wings of the site of Arbella; or Gaugamela rather said…, sonnetized by some Pazhetairoi, made up of 32 Syntagmas, as units of sixteen revived Falangists from Court V of the Helleniká Necropolis, bilocated on Patmos, a few feet from the Mandragoron project. Thus the triangular spellings of war were formed again, to the astonishment of all those present. Alexander the Great, already graceful, was over-trained in irrigation and supplications, he was consisting of 128 Syntagmas, with 62 Falangists covered by the Cinnabar that subdivided them into bones by sixteen of the Lochoi or guides. The Syntagma bipartite was enlarged by two Syntagamatarchos captaining two units, all with their semi-open belly, re-liquidating their viscera by the Ghosts of Shiraz, the Saltimbanqui Hydro comes from Roknabad (also known as Aub-e Rokní), from an underground channel which carried spring water to the city from a mountain located ten kilometers northeast of Shiraz. Here he has to mend the propellers and water ropes to do his acrobatics on the water, with greater songs in the poems of the Poet Hafiz. When he bites his tongue, they repair it with the verses of Hafiz's Koran, there are three hundred creeds, three hundred hectares to irrigate with his wheel the sadness of those who cannot have the gift of the rivalry of Montenegro and Monte Blanco, to overestimate the liveliness of the caravan that trembles with uncertain doubts here on Patmos "

Saltimbanqui of Bascule says: “We are Epi ghosts, green in reverie with tutelary ropes, to jump through the trapeze of the photometric units of the heavy Almeria of the highest Mirror of the Sea. Will take you back to Limassol. Curiously to the same ship as the Eurydice that sleeps in the swings of the sea, and in the arms of the petulance of Dionysus in a new awakening of lethargy of theorization of the superstrings of Anaximander, here is the intrinsic speculation of science, already that this is not just purely empirical research. "

In between them, they form even and odd rows. The horizontals were tinged with the Red Blood cells that became volatile and surrounded the Xyston lances, for thirty soldiers of the Diloquia, with their dismembered arms that began to take them back with their hands tightly girded by the song of the Theological Shemesh of San Juan, which subsequently rescinded last in the sum of two taxiarchies, constituting a Syntagma. The units rose with the sickle that cuts definitive death, to reconstitute it in five thousand that should tread through the hierarchies of formations, amid the frolics of the Phalanx, where Vernarth protested to all “Khaire, Kalos irthate apo tin kentriki, Welcome from Hell !"

Thus the Phalanx was constituted among the Syntagmas in metaphors of the Falangists. In this way this antiphon was revealed martial, denoting synergies of the Sybilla Herofila that conferred to the world of Trinitarian Doxology, among ashes that remained by a solid cobblestone witness of the reluctant troops that testified to the sense of interpreting the law of bringing to the world what to their lives it owes them. The prophecy shone from an intangible Isaiah before all in this concomitant episode, and to the degree of the reign of Judah, here together with the prophet Elijah, they faced the hardened fragrances of blessing as oracular teachers of so many goods, and of the benefactor that protects by inspirational mandate, making laws for the end times before closing his own eyes without having prophesied them.

The rows in “V" contrasted with the corridor friezes in the crowned troops of the Hetairoi, and in the syntagmas that became appressed from the triangle that opened the three-quarter proportions of Athenea's physiognomy in Pergamum, subjugating Alcineo, so that finally it was forged in constellations of equanimity in the fifth courtyard or "V" of the Necropolis of Helleniká in the allegory of Vernarth, stopping the plausible dogma of the initial that glosses the Law in Vernarth's "V". This in turn in double syntagm of the Syntagamatarchos guide, in the high sky of Patmos, and in the medrones growing on the antlers of the proclamation of Wonthelimar, which made them a twin "W" in the star that shines in the medrones of the Ibix, in the Cornacabra and in the Cornucopia, with certain docile movement, adhering to acrostic and prehensile preliminaries of the Isaiah saying.

The Phalanx Alexandrina Heterochromatic of Alexander the Great volatilized between the villi of his Falangists, climbs the Holm of Zeus and causes a "Gore" or horrifying reflection, allowing the rhizomes to become a hundredfold, which will make the nominal order of five thousand, for each member of the Syntagma, in an astonishing quantum that reproduced itself to materialize before Him. Then he tied each one of them as Prometheus chained to each of the oaks, from an Akane grocer, incontinenti withdraws a sharp dagger and opens each one's veins to free them from the isolation of so many years settled in their last heterochromia of the War Iridium that he conferred on them, to endure the visit of the spirited Grim Reaper. This causes liberation, in this way they re-install themselves in their bodies, with Iridium or iris that made them see before their optics in two biases of Hoplite alter egos, impacting half of their body. Alexander the Great, being the philanthropic heir and of Platonic legacy, made them superfluous in the melanin that fell from the Epíchisis or libation vessel, to taste the effluvia of Dionysus with the maenads, with wide ambivalence filling them with viticulture, so that they would flow through the veins of his soldiers, and to revive them with the Dionysian must of melanin to the left eye of the Hegemon King Alexander the Great, with Jasper in the left, and the right with ultramarine from the bottom of the Ionian, on the banks of the washed banks of Patmos, in high swells of Greek alcohol that was distilled from the Mosacism of the stones when unraveling the peripheral forces from the prefectures of the great native of Pelas. They ordered areas of all Greece under their heterochromia flow that gave life to the Perifereoaki, or periphery for Central and Western Macedonia that came with great vigor, with Epirius central, western Greece, Peloponnese, and Crete. East Macedonia and Thrace, Ionian Islands, North Aegean, and Thessaly, later they would go for the Aldehyde alcohol that summarized and epitomized Dionysus taking him with four eagles that distilled the unprisoned Syntagmas of the lines of 16, 32, 64, etc...., for purposes never to start on an omega all the way to the Ionian Islands from Corfu.

Alexander the Great, went near the pre-urbanization of the Mandragoron towards Vernarth, somewhat dizzy, and before attending to him he presented himself first to the Zefian; who looked at his iris like a foreman who re-divided his visuals, by prevailing in eagerness to restore his soldiers, to help in the construction of adventures of life, and to assist in building the Megaron, which still rested in the myopia of mythological vision of the Gods tied in animosity with the Titans. Overwhelmingly, he highlighted the clouding or turbidity that was seen beyond the radius or visual field of two realities, found in visual refraction and interference with refractive statisms of the periphery that led him to the other world in Babylon when death imprisoned him...? Here the root revived, it became parallel in a unique world with divergent lights, which entered his Akera or right-wing of his soldiers, bringing visual acuity that brought the perchlorate volatilizations that hovered in the boots of his soldiers, when they marched in awareness of the retina and of the mean light, that for the first time was clarified in true holistic and political from a Parthenon with the musk of mortals and immortals of neo Hegemonic ophthalmology, which he was already re-leading by his command, where he was going to invest his greatest and most spiritual elemental Commander Vernarth, with his Himation.

The rays of his eyes seemed distant, but they were diffuse and alternate, they wandered through the lens of his clouding, which blinds a partial of the left Akera, or flank of the Hypaspists that dazzled Parmenion. Here the optics of Alexander the Great, remained in the diatribe of the small eye next to another that was enlarged, being hyperopic of a mysterious confine in the severity of Dionisio when confronted with him, in light effects of the high liquid vineyard, refracting meridians in his troops next to the Hexagonal Primogeniture who observed them behind the magenta image, which was the one that flashed from the Clouded holm oak and eclipsed by calm heat movements, and rising air masses that were in the opportune station of good sense. When being aided by the Maenads and the Herophile, they were teaching from a parent, who now sponsored the entire political and spiritual will of the Hoplite side, made up of the King of the World Vernarth, together with Alexander the Great, after receiving the photocoagulated lightning bolts. of the officers, under redeeming and reduced of the metabolic, and of the oxygenated preeminences of new lungs for each devout consecrated body, towards Saint John, the Apostle, pigmented and mechanized with aggravating heterochromia, and extensive in the bodies raised in new parallels that have to confront an anonymous or semi-god by turning for his own.

V

Turning away from the temptation of town to walk in twilight viewing the warm lights from the ancient buildings those enclosures of chapel library refectory student rooms fellows’ chambers offices guarded by men in bowler hats whose occupants cross courtyard and cloister purposefully sometimes gowned (for the tourists perhaps) those cobbled passages the tall chimneys the gates and railings suddenly back in the busy streets bicycles everywhere tea necessary tea I catch the fatigue in your face time for apple strudel and jasmine infusion with a view of the chapel it took a hundred years and three Henrys to build.

VI

Choristers have a special way of walking in their robes swish they go as they make that 90 degree turn to enter the Choir the layclerks play this down but will forget themselves and swish the gown flies out Decani and Cantores go their separate ways to stand by their candles bow towards the altar the introit Oh Lord, I Lift My Heart to Thee by Orlando Gibbons a choir man in this very place 1596-8 knowing the echo well wrote accordingly hard not to tremble as the music floats to the stone vaulting a 170 feet above our heads

VII

Famous as a thespian kindergarten plays abound and tonight there’s six to see We enter an L shaped room with the stage at the right angle a sitting room with a green sofa a door to a bathroom a knitting basket on the coffee table four characters (and a bump) with two penguins (one disguised as another – real - hiding in the bathroom) there was even a piece of Battenberg cake on our seat to eat make of that what you will we did and laughed though not without the occasional poignant lump in the throat a tear in the eye

VIII

You sit with your back to a mirror so I practice smiling aware of the pleasure your bright face brings me constantly this warmth of your company the tilt of your head your cheeks’ glow the sweet cadences of your voice though tired food and wine revive It won’t be too late after the brisk walk back through the brightly lit streets forever letting our hands come apart then re-engage to manage the pavements and throngs of Friday evening so much today so much to take to bed my love your beauty nightdressed in white to my surprise and pleasure

I cut off ******* from the hand of the poet who can’t stop from writing the hymns of her.
I put them in my ears so I could escape the redundant song
About the girl with the face that inspired the seas and it’s depths
And the sun
And the moon
And the stars
And a spirit that defeated them all
I would’ve used two of my own, but I need all 10 to compose this sacrilegious psalm

Because I value Beauty not
Although I guess it’s only me
They’ll adorn your scars as long as they don’t bleed
and applaud your broken bones as long as they aren’t visible through busted seams
And they live to hear her story
No matter how old or recent
But If you look like the hell you’ve gone through they’d rather you just
Didn’t.

Or perhaps you prefer that narrative
of hate
And slaughter
And lust
But no matter how many time it’s spun
I still can’t seem to trust

The girl with the mind that dared to lock eyes with the void and it’s breadth
And time
And space
And death
And a soul that embraced them all
She’s prayed for the devil one too many times and that’s probably why he won’t leave her alone

Cause she’ll  tell you her name is fearless
And that she’s mystical and cold
But really she’s Banality
And her lionhearted stories
Old
I suppose it’s not her fault
Nor is it Beauty’s either
That their tales are all derivative
And clichéd, their Author’s leisure

They’re shrines to archetypal aspiration
Overwatered brain garden
Concept vegetation
So I pulled up Beauty’s roots
And those of Banality too
And reveled in their surprise as a **** like me ripped them from the view.
And I plant them here with me
amongst the blooming Apostasies
And how willingly they drink
My Eucharist of impiety

And now I sit with open veins
And written in my blood this
Antiphon remains
But since we’re all just echoes in the void
I’ll know  you’re lying if you say
you didn’t lick your fingers anyway
when turning the pages of this introit