Nkechi Ebubedike, Cloud Collage VI (detail), featured in AGNI 104
De Re Publica
Because you still lived with the idea of a Republic
you knocked on doors, you waved
your sign by the side of the road, you leafed
through old stories and found Cicero
still defending the Senate though armed gangs
brawled through the street flinging mud and stones
and burned his house, the Triumvirate
roared, real estate boomed, and for banquets: roast
peacocks, oysters, asparagus, chicken, loins
of goat and boar, sow’s udders, boar’s head, duck and hare.
“True law is Reason right and natural.”
He dreamed a divine spark lit each human being. Yet
“I am sure Rome is finished. Why keep pretending?”
When they burned the Senate. When the strongmen’s armies clashed.
“For there is an ideal of human goodness.”
He wrote on papyrus with a reed pen and oak gall ink.
Because he attacked Antony.
Because Antony brought on the country
war, pestilence, debt, debauchery, and ruin.
Because when Octavian betrayed him
the officers caught Cicero as he travelled in his litter
and hacked off his head as he greeted them
and nailed his head and his hand which wrote the Philippics
to the Rostra in the Roman Forum. And
you still lived with the idea of a Republic—
Rosanna Warren
Rosanna Warren is a member of AGNI’s Advisory Board. She is the author of six poetry collections—Hindsight (2025), So forth (2020), Ghost in a Red Hat (2011), Departure (2003), Stained Glass (1993), and Each Leaf Shines Separate (1984), all from W. W. Norton & Co.—and one chapbook of poems (Snow Day, Palaemon Press, 1981). Max Jacob: A Life in Art and Letters (2020) and Fables of the Self: Studies in Lyric Poetry (2008), a book of literary criticism, have also appeared from Norton. She edited and contributed to The Art of Translation: Voices from the Field (Northeastern University Press, 1989), and has edited three chapbooks of poetry by prisoners. With Stephen Scully, she translated Euripides’ Suppliant Women for Oxford University Press (1995). She has won fellowships from, among others, the Guggenheim Foundation, the American Council of Learned Societies, The Ingram Merrill Foundation, the Lila Wallace-Readers’ Digest Fund, and the Cullman Center at the New York Public Library. Stained Glass won the Lamont Poetry Award from the Academy of American Poets. She has also won the Witter Bynner Prize from the American Academy of Arts and Letters, the Lavan Younger Poets’ Prize from the Academy of American Poets, the Award of Merit in Poetry from The American Academy of Arts and Letters, and the David Ferry and Ellen LaForge Poetry Prize from Suffolk University. A chancellor of the Academy of American Poets from 1999 to 2005, she is a member of the American Academy of Arts and Sciences, the American Academy of Arts and Letters, and the American Philosophical Society. Warren is Hanna Holborn Gray Distinguished Service Professor Emerita in the Committee on Social Thought at the University of Chicago. (updated 10/2026)