Daniel King
Pope St Linus
My name is crumbling,
Like castle mortar mixed with too much sea-shell.
The dust obscures my altar and the Rock on which it is erected,
My anonymity a shadow over Peter,
The Church itself,
Two thousand years from now.
Time needs its own redeemer, but the Scriptures are unclear
Concerning Christ’s precise relationship to time.
My Being is adrift on the Holy See!
Some act is necessary, some loud fact to echo down the centuries,
Though nothing that would emphasize concealment or obscurity,
Or the curtailment of communication.
So not the fact of my identity:
Hercules was my father,
My birth the thirteenth Labour –
And yet his name will also be distorted, veiled
By censors like Irenaeus,
His texts a labyrinth of tunnels, structurally damaging
To everything above.
But there is nothing else!
Indeed, nothing is certain in a time when history has not become a
discipline,
Let alone itself a construct formed by history.
I must therefore resign myself to falsity –
My martyrdom and thus my immortality.
I must submit to the ellipse rather than enshrine the Line
Of Apostolic Succession.
I must embrace the breakage and the gaming of the Letter:
Preside over a theory of shattered temporality,
Of which I am the weary patron saint.
Historians will state that it was not a time of persecution.
They are correct. It was a persecution of time.
Page(s) 140
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