From "JB"
Day of wrath, O Day of mourning! / Earth to ashes now returning / "Gather,” by the millions, burning!
Cleansed at last by cataclysm / Butchered rhyme and battered rhythm, / Neopagan narcissism!
On that day, Lord, when thou comest, / And our dreadful hymnals thumbest,/ Smite the ugliest and dumbest.
Smite them, Lord, yet of thy pity / Take their songsters to thy city: / Even Haugen, Haas, and Schutte.
Spare them on the stern condition / That they feel a true contrition / For the Worship III edition.
Doom them not to loss and ruin / While the darker storm is brewing!/ They knew not what they were doing.
On that day when Palestrina / Dare not touch a celestina, / What will Sister Ballerina?
With thine eyes that pierce like lances / Still her heathen silly dances/ And her flirting with Saint Francis.
Purge us of the prim and prissy, / Ditties fit for Meg or Missy, / Not for Francis, but a sissy.
Cantors who thought nothing grander / Than a sheaf of propaganda / Writ like office memoranda.
Raise them to thy room to bide in / Where their hearts and ears may widen/ To the strains of Bach and Haydn.
Let their hearts within them falter, / Hearing, as they near thine altar,/ Seraphs sing the Scottish Psalter.
Seize those devils set to pen a / Hymnal neutered of its men–ah, / Fling ‘em all to black Gehenna!
Fling them one and all to mangle / Their pronominals, and wrangle / Lest a participle dangle!
Who held manhood in derision, / Preaching double circumcision, / Suffer now their own revision.
Though the songs of Hell are naughty, / None by Handel or Scarlatti,/ At the least they’ll have castrati.
Pitch, O Lord, the bald and raucous / Slogans of a leftist caucus / Down to Sheol, or Secaucus!
Save their singers, though: restore ‘em / To a silent sweet decorum, / Saecula per saeculorem [sic].
Various are the throngs of heaven: / Some were lump, and some were leaven,/ Some as lame as six or seven.
When the demons hear thy curses, / And this world’s dense fog disperses,/ Heal the hobbled–not their verses.
Hush me too, Lord, when I grumble: / In thy mercy make me humble,/
Lest On Turkey’s Wings I stumble.
Though Haugen sing “Hosea” evermore, / Save me, I pray–but keep me near the door.
Amen.
HT: Christus Vincit
Ah, you caught the typo for saeculorum. I didn't when I swiped it from somewhere else. I can't remember precisely...I think First Things.
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