[Kzyxtalk] prose poem

[nsi at mcn.org]

Nice piece of unburdening literature, John. --beth bosk
On Tue, 2 May 2017 19:15:31 +0000 (UTC), John Sakowicz <sako4 at comcast.net>
wrote:
> THE MAN I WANT TO BE Many years ago, in 1980, I visited the Edgar Cayce
> Institute in Virginia Beach, Virginia, with my first wife, Patricia -- a
> feminist, a Marxist, and an historian who was asked to leave her
position
> as a teaching fellow at the Johns Hopkins University for being too
> radical. She wasn't. She was brilliant, and the Art History Department
at
> Hopkins at that time was sexist.  The department was chaired by a
> misogynist and closet white supremacist, Egon Verheyen, who had actually
> been a member of the Hitler Youth, or Hitlerjugend, as a teenager. Not
> surprisingly, Dr. Verheyen's chief scholarly interest was the art and
> architecture of the German medieval period.  Patricia and I were living
> in Maryland, and our first daughter of four daughters had just been
born.
> We had traveled all the way to the Edgar Cayce Institute from Koinonia,
a
> Quaker community in the northern suburbs of Baltimore in the Greenspring
> Valley Historic District.  It was lovely at Koinonia.
> Beautifully-landscaped. A historic Tudor-style mansion and carriage
> house.  We were so lucky to live there. Built in 1902 by Alexander J.
> Cassatt, president of the Pennsylvania Railroad and brother of the
> American Impressionist painter, Mary Cassatt. the estate was presented
as
> a wedding gift to Cassatt's daughter, Eliza. Later owners included the
> prominent Brewster family, one of whom became a Senator from Maryland.
In
> the 1950s the estate became home to the Quakers and the Koinonia
> Foundation, a predecessor of the Peace Corps Patricia and I made that
> 263-mile trip from Koinonia to the Edgar Cayyce Institute in an old but
> glorious 1962 Chevy Impala SS -- a convertible.  Roman red, my Impala
> stood out in the crowd. Lots of horsepower in that V8 engine. Lots of
> noise coming from the pipes of the dual exhaust. It was my first car,
and
> our first road trip as a family. The trip took about five hours.
Patricia
> was a believer in the whole clairvoyance thing. Me? I was a skeptic. 
> Patricia, herself, had considerable psychic abilities, and not all of
> them were positive. She was "witchy", for lack of a better word.  Once
at
> the Edgar Cayce Institute, Patricia had her reading first. It was a
> private reading -- just Patricia and the psychic. Then, it was my turn
> for a reading.  I was a little anxious. I didn't know why. I was
> described by the psychic -- a rather portly, older, kind, grandmotherly
> woman -- as "the last centurion guarding the last bridge to Rome." She
> said I was the last centurion guarding the last bridge to Rome.over the
> Tiber as the Visigoths advanced on the city.  The psychic went on to say
> that as this "last centurion" I had been trapped between the precarious
> and chaotic reign of Rome's last emperor and Alaric, and, of course, his
> barbarians at the Salarian Gate.  The date was 24 August 410.  The
> Visigoths had nothing but the Sack of Rome on their minds -- rape,
> murder, pillage, and either ransoming the few survivors or selling them
> into slavery. And I was the last trusted centurion of Stilicho, the last
> honorable Roman general. Stilicho commanded Rome's last legion while
> treachery consumed Rome from within. Honor was all. For both of us.
> Stilicho and his loyal centurion, me. Me. I was the last centurion
> guarding the last bridge to Rome. In her trance, the psychic further
> called me a "warrior monk" and a "warrior poet". She said she saw me,
and
> the group of centuries of 80 men under my command, all being slaughtered
> by the Visigoths -- our bodies mutilated, in fact -- but later, many
> lifetimes later, the psychic said she saw all of us going on to be
> reincarnated as the first Pauperes commilitones Christi Templique
> Salomonici, also known as the Order of Solomon's Temple.  In France, we
> were known as the Ordre du Temple or Templiers,  Our Arabic name is
> فرسان الهيكل‎‎ . We were known by most simply as the
> Knights Templar. That future incarnation to serve again was the reward
> for our sacrifice for Rome. Our reward for honor. From the moment of our
> deaths, we were destined to become the very first Knights Templar. Was
it
> true? Maybe yes. Maybe no. Maybe it was just a bunch of New Age mumbo
> jumbo. I don't know.  How could I possibly know? Nevertheless, I
> shuddered and shook and felt like crying when the psychic at the Edgar
> Cayce Institute told me all this -- it rang true. Or I desperately
wanted
> for it to be true. I wanted to be that man. I still want to be that man.