Requiem Aeternam Deo: The Madman's Song

Empty chapel or silent tomb
Great monument of heroic past?
Now enveloped in a morbid gloom
Now crowded but ruined alas

Is the altar for worship of an immortal name?
Or an eulogy of former glory
We each threw in our tiny flame
To feed the pyre for the dead Body.

The madman jumped like a madman would
Swinging his lantern as he moved
Indifferent to the sombre mood
He danced 'round the firewood

Amidst the cracking of the funeral fire
The madman's song pierced our hearts
As the fire of death burned brighter
His tune grew cold and dark:

I seek God! I seek God! I seek God!
Where is Him once dwelt hither?
We'll search, but we'll find not;
For we've killed him, you and I, murderers of murderers

Did we drink up all the ocean?
And unchained the earth from its sun?
Whither now our directions?
With all life's meaning undone

The smell of the rotten holiness
The wetness of our bloody knives
They stood with the fire as Witnesses
We killed God and he died

He sang again the last verse, more determined
Only with a worse fanatic frenzy
Before he finished the song he was singing,
He jumped into the pyre, to die with his enemy

They say we've inherited a loftier time
For our fathers had killed the holy One
Now finally freedom from the Divine
Now finally life's meaning undone

*Inspired by Nietzsche's parable of the madman

Jack