Ozef Kalda, Leos Janacek and Seamus Heaney

 

Prayers

pour through my mind

 like sand down

through an hourglass

Beowulf

The Truth is clear

Almighty God rules

over mankind and

always has.

Lines 700-702

Seamus Heaney: "Follower"

My father worked with a horse-plough,
His shoulders like a full sail strung

Between the shafts and the furrow.

The horses strained at his clicking tongue.

An expert. He would set the wing

And fit the bright steel-pointed sock.

The sod rolled over without breaking.

At the headrig, with a single pluck

Of reins, the sweating team turned round

And back into the land. His eye 

Narrowed and angled at the ground,

Mapping the furrow exactly.

I stumbled in his hobnailed wake,

Fell sometimes on the polished sod;

Sometimes he rode me on his back

Dipping and rising to his plod.

I wanted to grow up and plough,

To close one eye, stiffen my arm.

All I ever did was follow

In his broad shadow round the farm.

I was a nuisance, tripping, falling,

Yapping always. But today

It is my father who keeps stumbling 

Behind me, and will not go away.

Seamus Heaney "100 Poems"

Farrar, Straus and Giroux, 2018 

Beowulf

...

May one so valiant

and venturesome

come unharmed

through

the clash of battle ... 


Lines 299 - 300

Beowulf

                        ... no weapons, therefore,

for either this night: unarmed he shall face me

if face me he dares. And may the Divine Lord

in His wisdom grant the Glory of Victory

to whichever side He sees fit.






From "Beowulf", (Lines  683 - 687)
W. W. Norton & Company, Inc
Beowulf
Translation  Seamus Heaney  (1939 - 2013)

Seamus Heaney (1939 - )

                                       
                                                                
                                                                


From "Diary of One Who Vanished"
a new version of "A Song Cycle" by Leos Janacek
of "Poems" by Ozef Kalda
Farrar, Strauss and Giroux 2000
"Diary of One Who Vanished"