I think I'll read one more prose piece than I meant to.
So that's-- but this one is called Crusade.
Peter the Hermit awoke in a cave above a cold valley, rain.
He was a hardier man than I am though I profess
to be hardier than I am.
What did Peter the Hermit profess hardy as he was?
Sometimes he slept standing.
From soft spring meadows, from fishy streams, and shade,
and forests full of creatures before tapestries,
he called those who were born to all that round
life, the oppressed and oppressors of that moment,
maker and taker, and made them listen after a long time
though at first they ignored him.
Either their beasts were fat and they themselves happy
at table and in bed, and hoping to get richer,
yet fearing for what they had fire, imminence of disease,
suddenness of death, urgency of life to come
and at the same time bored and believing
that there was something else.
Or they were full of Black bile hacking
and hewing at each other or both.
He persisted in drawing their attentions
to their own pain, joy, and hope,
and linking what they dreaded to what they concealed.
When they came to him, he told the men to leave everything,
the women to send them away to set free a city
that none of them had ever seen, which had been theirs
for 1,000 years, and in which they would all live forever
once they had died.
He convinced them with their bad dreams.
He invented visions of bliss which they did not want to deny
were theirs.
They followed him through deliberate
sleep not daring to wait, contriving
new theories of possession, imagining new fortifications,
carving a long, wet red road for the ox cart of knowledge
it is written, they who could not read.
Some came back and were buried at home having seen the city.
Nobody knows much about him.
You either believe or you don't.
There is only the cave he is said to have slept in.
Nobody called him Peter, nobody woke him.
He may never have slept at all.