A Last Conversation and Elegy

Posted by orthodoxillumination on September 29, 2022 · 1 Comment 

A Last Conversation and Elegy

                        – for Monk Maximos

To stand beside you in this hour,

to look upon your face composed as it is

in your final rest,

those intelligent features sunk in suffering

from your final days, but

these are the features I know.

It is when one stands here 

by the open casket

surrounded by signs and songs of the Resurrection

that one can say – this is the man. This is the one I know.

The words and deeds are done, and what exists

is the everlasting knowledge of a life like no other.

How can this be death?

It is a pause in the universal rhythms in which

I want only to stand here 

and talk with you for a moment –

            actually, what I would like

is to sit here for a while in the remnant of your contemplations

and converse with them. I have so many questions.

You always evoked my questions, every one of them

the most important in me at the time

since the days of our youth, and there are still so many

concerning this surprising direction our lives took

in spite of all our spectacular failures, and

what this mystery is at the end of things

now that you’ve grown silent.

And I know nothing at all

of this last turn you took,

the old highway into the mountains,

toiling up that final peak in quiet 

alone

            but I suppose

that is how it should be.

I would like to, if I could, 

sit here like the angel at the empty tomb, 

these recollections in my heart illumined

like a golden orarion wrapped crosswise around it

with the realization now –

but that is not really permitted where

the great and holy mystery draws down its curtain

while Mother Nectaria sings the ancient 

psalms unfolding their secrets fully at last

as though she already knows

the questions, and many of the answers.

She was with you that day

when you first went into the temple on Geary Street.

You may not have foreseen that day

how many histories overturned and renewed,

the long desperate search nearing its end

in the tomb of the miracle-worker, in the bare

footsteps that found their way through war and revolution

and through the ages even; but she knew. 

Even then, she knew.

                        Decades roll past

carried on the backs of song and celebrations –

remember, when we were young,

the impossible treasures we sailed into horizons after,

sacked Rome and Constantinople looking for ourselves?

The years we shared best,

learning the long nights of prayer together

after you returned from your studies overseas,

discovering the sweet anonymity

of a simple parish life

and weeping with gratitude became

the person you always were anyway…

but this is not the hour to talk about it.

This will be another night of prayer, igniting

vigil lamps along your mountain path 

to that secret chapel in the pines where you always wanted to go.

Those singing now – do you recognize the voices,

whose wisdom you searched so carefully at the end?

We, too, intoning what we can hear,

astonished in the divine harmony

how the heart kindled, suddenly flares up,

making our funeral lament the cry

            Alleluia!

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