Mack
Hall
17
February 2013
Cincinnatus
When
Cincinnatus in a desperate time
Was
called to serve the undeserving stateImperiled by the armies of the kings
And weakened by senatorial whisperings
Our conscript father laid aside the plough
Forswore retirement and his peaceful fields
Unwillingly took up the imperium
And journeyed thus to disharmonious Rome
To teach, to govern, and to sanctify
A people lost and drifting with the age
To hazard all in the forum of the world
Not for himself, not for brittle applause
Blown by the wind, noisy for a brief time
As when October’s leaves make temporal show
And then decay through winter’s cold demands
Nor for the silky smiles of ambassadors
The approval of jugglers and panderers
The cricket-voices of mummers and polls
No
But
rather for the fuller at his cloth
The
builder with his plans and rule and lineThe seamstress working a wedding dress
The laughing child at play with her favorite doll
The sunburnt fisherman drawing his nets
The mother teaching her child his aves
The farmer treading the fruitful furrow
The humble priest offering holy rites
The parish tipstaff on his daily beat
The scrivener with his busy abacus
The chemist with his pots and potions and pills
The healer, whose pallid patients are her prayers
The artist, whose lines and colors delight
The barrister, pleading for true justice
The magister lettering inattentive youths
The woman whose shop displays good, homely needs
The sick man on his penitential bed
The young recruit on obscure weary watch
The wretched beggar who gives holy blessings
For these a Cincinnatus offered all
Repute, honor, perhaps his very life
And when, withered with age and cares of rule
Painfully unsure of step and sight and self
He wisely, humbly left the robes of office
In prayerful trust to the Will of God
And wearily wended to the Altar of beginnings
To give himself and his last days to us
Still serving, bidding for us with priestly heart
Let none he faithfully serves question his prayers
Or mock him with idle speculations
For flattering courtiers are as common as smiles
Painted upon false lips, hiding false desirings
And generals arise from time to time to draft
Houris to their beds and youths to their deaths
As do the successors of Simon Magus
Pirouetting in their temples to self
-
But Cincinnatus – O happy Cincinnatus
Whose memory is incense in the night
Or a candle in the holy darkness:
His Tenebrae is our continued blessing
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