Waged long ago, two kingdoms in forgotten war,
Mazdah struck Jupiter, Shapur felled Jovian.
Shapur, self-proclaimed paragon of ancestors,
By will alone reshaped his kingdom protean.
Hailed he as king o’er kings the son of Ormizd blazed
Tyrant’s light shone wicked by the bodies burning.
Where are your towers over Macedonia,
Or exult praise from history discerning?
The ones your edict slew were stars of higher sphere,
Their crowns far nobler than the horns upon your brow.
Your false virtue’s conceit betrayed your lowly rank,
Humble they rose to where your pride would not allow.
O Sadoc martyr, shepherd called by Simeon,
To whom the feudal lords of earth could not dictate,
Endured torture in a prison long turned to dust
And rose to heaven with one hundred and twenty eight.
This poem at first looks
like an unwelcome enigma.
Who or what are all these names?
Mazdah, Jupiter, Shapur, Jovian, relics
in memory of late Roman times,
smeared with the dark red blood of Persia’s warriors,
mixed with the dust of dead rocks,
scattered like piles of old books
that I cannot, or would not, read.
But hauling in the firmament
of the dark blue heavens,
raising from the tombs
the mystic breath of buried stars,
nothing in this world
can hold the cup he drinks from,
that spills from his scraping wounds
the words of night,
shining feebly on a most sure path,
that taken by the world’s most fearful ingrate,
this martyr, and the hundred twenty-eight.
***
Curiously, a Google ad appeared under your poem when I opened and read it the first time.
I followed this link and was shown my best morning funny of this week:
http://tinyurl.com/4arqntd
Poverty never tires of disinfecting the world of the riches of God’s Truth.
You are, as always, looking out for me brother and seeking to find me when I am lost.
Thank you.
Forgive me, I edited your comment because the blog software choked on the URL you posted. I replaced it with a “tinyurl” redirect so that people could still follow it. This man speaks the same words that I had heard so often growing up. I’m rather surprised that it takes him so long to actually get to wherever he is going. He’s almost a parody of himself.
The worst point was when I realized this is how I used to talk and how I’m tempted to talk even to this day. They say alcoholics are never really cured, they are always “recovering”. So it is with preachers.
Thanks for the redirect on that url.
I arrived at your poem thru a link on FaceBook and perhaps that, or the fact that I use Google Chrome (ugh! it’s buggy!), allowed Google ads to appear. The headline of this url said something like “The True Church, founded AD 31″. It made me laugh even before I opened it, as it reminded me of those silly bumper stickers that read “Orthodox Christianity, founded AD 33.” I used to have one, but it was when I first became Orthodox 23 years ago. In those days I wore my Orthodoxy like a case of smallpox. Staying at the ‘hospital’ awhile cured me.
By the way, this is one of your better poems, I think.
I have a 19th century edition in 4 volumes of Butler’s ‘Lives of the Saints’. The reason I love it is because it was put together berfore modern times and Christianity’s overly picky and confused self-editing of its history. In these books are found the elusive gems of hagiography that until the internet could almost not be found by ordinary mortals.
I was gratified to find that Butler’s books are online, which is where I found the story of the martyr referred to in this poem: http://www.bartleby.com/210/2/202.html
I thought some of your readers might be interested in seeing this.
While I have made many stupid statements since becoming Orthodox, one thing has kept me from the worst abuses. I remember distinctly telling my priest (who I had only spoken with once or twice at that point), “One thing worries me, that folks will say, ‘David sure has become a jerk since converting to Orthodoxy.’” I’m not sure if that’s humility or vanity’s sense of self-preservation. The only real record of my folly is in the comment boxes of other people’s blogs during this period.
I like this poem’s rhythm though I almost bit off more than I could chew. It looks like each stanza is 4 lines of 6 feet but they are really 2 lines of 12.
As I want to look deeply into the lives of the saints for a while, it occurs to me that there is a tension between the historical context and the Eschatological context. Perhaps this poem is a good starting point for exploring that.
Thanks for the Bartleby link. I did some reading when I was writing this poem about the war that was going on in the East at the time. Apparently Shapur II was concerned because the Romans (while not being Christian) had legalized Christianity and saw Christians in the Persian Empire as a sort of 5th column. So he became more brutal than the Romans had been in repressing them.
The Britannica Academic site had this wonderful quote from a letter Shapur II had sent to the Roman Emperor:
I Sapor, king of kings, partner of the stars, brother of the sun and the moon, to Constantius Caesar my brother send much greeting . . . Because . . . the language of truth ought to be unrestrained and free, and because men in the highest rank ought only to say what they mean, I will reduce my propositions into a few words . . . Even your own ancient records bear witness that my ancestors possessed all the country up to the Strymon and the frontier of Macedonia. And these lands it is fitting that I who (not to speak arrogantly) am superior to those ancient kings in magnificence, and in all eminent virtues, should now reclaim. But I am at all times thoughtful to remember that, from my earliest youth, I have never done anything to repent of.
Love that quote of Shapur… honestly.