When All the Songs Have Ceased

By Brendan Michael

When all the songs have ceased

And feasting saints are gathered

To share in glory and in gladness,

They sit at rest, enamored

When the Bridegroom stands

To crown the greatest of them –

Furtive looks and shifts around the table,

Like the Twelve sniffing out the Traitor,

They wait to see who shall receive

Those crowns given to the Givers,

Whose lives were marked

By what they offered.

Some of us, who in the Old World sought

The safety of having much,

Know in our perfection the crowns must pass,

And secretly wish we had been poorer.

Instead the Lord is moving

To a small and quiet group at table’s end,

And we had almost forgotten them:

The poor old widow, giving the paltry coins of poverty;

The boy whose meager meal of bread and fish

were made to feed the multitude;

The peasant girl who deigned to spill

the sweet perfume of precious nard;

The blind and lame, the pagan guard,

the woman who bled, the deaf and dumb,

All bring nothing but faith alone

To the Author and Perfecter.

To these He gave the Giving crowns –

They who learned to love and give

What an unworthy world could never value:

Themselves.

That was all they had to offer, we know —

Though the world had only vowed

To take and take from them.

They had known the pains

Of never having;

Of only tasting, in their want,

A strange and otherworldly blessing.