Cantata, A. Lincoln

O let us sing a story about our nation's hero. There
is an inner glory we sense and must explain,

Our praire Christ, our hangman-God, our martyr President
is but a vulgar story,

Created by the mind which makes the dead man rise to
Life once more, Oscar Wilde and Kruger and Booth himself were seen
crowded

After their death, far off but surely, in a/distant
square of a foreign city. This is the instinct of the mind which
tells the vulgar story,

Forgetting that had he but lived, he would have been
Andrew
impeached like/Johnson,
probably

If there are likelihoods, if the nation must/have
gone on the path which it went,

(Although there is freedom in history), and Rome
might well have fallen many years before or after,

(When Rome fell who knew it had fallen, how many
knew what had happened?)

He would have probably been impeached, if not for
Booth's quick-moving bullet, (How just, to be killed by an
actor, in a theatre).

O with what speed apotheosis moves, how quickly
this nation's hero was elected

To five dollar bills and pennies, and Hollywood's
cast of characters,

Although he prepared or was prepared by his own
or his milieu's intuitions, [and by unavoidable conditions],

And when elected President and when the crisis
intensified,

Went about from place to place kissing infants
and growing the beard by which we know him,

Our manic-depressive hero who ran away from his

A.Lincoln, 2

marriage, and had to be locked in a room to keep him from killing himself,

And could not be persuaded to forget his despondency,
and made his strength of his lack of conviction by drawing
from it compromises,

Compromises again and again, flowing from the depths
of his indecisiveness,

Until the necessities of History caught him like a
man in a crowd moving forward through the small doorway

Of a great office building, an unutterable fear of
fire!

Until the necessity of history brought him victory and
took his shawl, and took his melancholy and took his gaunt
unhappiness,

And took his hollow-cheeked face, suffering with his
own despair,

And made him the saint of the national destiny, and of
the industrial Republic--

All that he knew, he knew
Through knowing the worst despair
Though some gain knowledge through joy,
This one, pain's cross must bear...

Never mind what Karl Marx said, writing letters from
London: what could have but a can-window view or train window view

Of what happened? Who, however, discussed both parties
as wrong, and was as wrong because of God's commandment?
Who denied the falseness of the lesser evil and the
presence of only two alternatives?

Using various violent examples, such as Rome and
Lawrence in Arabia, asked to choose between two soldiers in
sodomy?