I Have No Episcopal Palace

by Brett Rutherford

Adapted from Victor Hugo, l’Annee Terrible, “June 1871”

 

I have no episcopal palace in town.
I have no stipend or government salary.
My humility is not offered up a throne
within a temple of stone. No stern
Swiss guards stand watch on either side
of me. I do not go daily forth
beneath a four-plumed canopy,
watched by the wide-eyed imbeciles.
France, even now in its abysmal low,
is still for me defined
by the labor of one great people
from whom the great law emerges.

 

I hate to see my nation bound and gagged,
or covered all over with dainty fleur-de-lys.
I do not tell church visitors
     they haven’t seen Christ
until they’ve paid to see the Van Dyck painting.
My holy place suffices to itself.
Churchwardens and beadles frown not there;
trustees, custodians, and clerks
     neither annoy nor admonish me.
Deacons and vicars I pass on by.
I have no Saints, nor even part of one
     stiffed into a reliquary,
nor under lock and key some flask
     purporting a miracle.
My robe is not festooned with diamonds,
and no one pays me by the line for prayers.

 

At court, I am not really presentable.
It baffles me that dowagers admire
some fellow begging pennies with a wooden bowl.
With no gold cope around my neck,
nor a gleaming miter atop my head,
I have no good women hand-kissing me.
I may have had a glimpse of heaven once;
no fold of bleating lambs it seemed.
The way in was narrow, and I had no key.
No one calls me Monseigneur.
I am out in the fields a lot; incense
is not the whiff you would get from me.
My dresser has no purple stockings.

 

Yes, I have made mistakes,
     each one an act sincerely made.
I keep hypocrisy apart from me:
the things I say are what I think.
I put imprisoned Socrates
     right next to Jesus on his cross.

When, hunted like a beast, a man
cries out, I save him if I can.
If he was my enemy,
     must he remain forever so?
I despise Basil, and disdain Scapin.

 

I give the hungry child some bread.
I fought for what was true, and good,
and honest; and in the howling storm
I suffered two decades’ exile.
God willing, I will start again
tomorrow. And when that voice in me
says “Forward!”, that way I go.
The wind may go against me, but I go.
Because I do my duty thus,
the Bishop of Ghent, bless his heart,
writes here in today’s newspaper
that if I am not indeed a madman,
I should be called a bandit.