Two sons of Latium in Gaul interred:
one robed in grey, the other white and black
whose place among the masters went deferred
when Love-Unholy launched his crude attack
upon these minor preachers of the Word
who drew no revenue from Notre-Dame
but pleaded shamelessly for daily bread
amidst the squares and streets with blessèd calm
while suffering the oil upon their head
till, ultra montes, justice heard and cried
and swam the sleepy Seine and blessed its bank
where long at last those beggars long denied
a chair received with joy their rightful rank
(eodem anno eodemque die).
Processions end, and thus their ways diverge
(not ev’ry pilgrim treads the same worn path)
but followers, by some perverted urge,
transformed the roads to trenches lined with wrath
and trails first tread by inkstrokes on the page
became the bristling barricades of greed
and habits rushed to fill them so to wage
war o’er a phrase of apostolic creed:
Quaeritur:
how ought we understand the end of time
when flesh shall stand before the judgment seat
to fall into the pit of tares and lime
and fire, or rise like bread of leavened wheat?
“If form,” the grey-clad asked, “be simply one,
how can we say the body ought to rise?
Should we deny the Passion of the Son?
Art thou not pagan Plato in disguise?”
With head inclined, the other master prayed
and contemplated the Apocalypse
and, calling silently on heav’nly aid
(the scapular descending from his lips),
“I cannot follow Plato here,” he said,
“whose students claim plurality of forms.
Morphe need not persist in bodies dead,
for God shall reunite what he reforms.”
Upon this question friendship never broke
(the rupture lies among those whom they taught);
God called them both in seemingly one stroke
and for their honor, heirs contrived their plot.
We need not now enumerate the names
of those who levied war within the schools
nor trace the tangled disputation games
where masters stood outgunned by lesser fools. . .
Two sons of Latium in Gaul interred:
a minor eminence; a hound of God.
The fates of each their bodies speak a word
to reach beyond the paths which each had trod.
The first professed that bodies must remain
a sep’rate form until the final day;
the second held that man must but retain
a substance one in life and in decay.
Sed contra:
The body of the former is no more,
dispersed in desecration by the hand
of those who, hot with sin and fury, swore
to banish ev’ry relic from the land.
The body of the latter lies secure
enclosed in steel and stone and glass and gold
awaiting the enrollment of the pure
into th’Eternal Shepherd’s single fold.
What each had taught by preaching and by pen
was realized more fully in the other,
and by their winding paths, these two again
embrace beneath the mantle of their Mother,
unceasingly acclaiming in the light:
O Holy Holy Holy Lord of Might.
