"Here is the rose, here dance."—G. W. F. Hegel
“Forum dancing”—In foro saltare—
M. Tullius Cicero thought depraved.*
Just who in Rome had danced in that vile ring?
The Forum is for the gladiators’
ghastly blood-letting bouts, also for
feeding hungry lions; it's not for swing!
Cato Junior had tempted cruel Fate
“as though he lived in Plato’s Republic
and not Romulus’s shit,” Cicero scoffed,¶
who lived in Romulus's late crap himself.
His severed head and hands spiked on the Rostra,
Livia stuck her hairpin through his tongue.
Fortuna has her ways to bring you down.
She's ruled millennially in every city.
Aesop’s Boastful Traveler felt her near,
and what to think, or what to fear? “Here’s Rhodes, jump
here!” / “Here is the rose, here dance”—Hegel's ditty.†
That piper plays a pleasant peasant tune.
Thus with your goddamn bourgeois piety, Marx
expostulates, “until a situation
is created which makes all turning back
impossible and the [cruel] conditions
themselves call out: Hic Rhodus, hic salta!”‡
"Thank God I'm not a Marxist!" Karl rejoiced,
observing how followers got ahead.
Dance on you happy few who give a shit
and hope to pollinate the pistils out
in the big parterre that flanks our cottage.
Much may perplex you. I’ll explain it here:
Marx and the troubadours—the latter's name means
“finders”—both steered us wrong. However mad may be our song, turning back solves nothing
for human beings formed by folly in
these Big Rock Candy Mountains. And puzzling
is a poem’s purpose, not nostalgia.
*Cicero, de Officiis 3.75. See also Nicholas Ostler, Ad Infinitum: A Biography of Latin (New York: Walker, 2007), 185.
¶“ . . . loquitur enim tanquam Republica Platonis, non tanquam in fæce Romuli,” Cicero writes in a letter to a friend of the Stoic Marcus Porcius Cato (95–46 BCE), called Cato the Younger (Cato Minor in Latin).
† G. W. F. Hegel, Preface to the Philosophy of Right.
‡"Let's pretend this is Rhodes, leap here." https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Hic_Rhodus,_hic_salta. Marx, The Eighteenth Brumaire of Louis Bonaparte.