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 

Stephen Crane (1871-1900): "I Saw a Man Pursuing The Horizon"

 

I saw a man pursuing the horizon;

Round and round they sped.

I was disturbed at this;

I accosted the man.

"It is futile," I said,

"You can never --- "

"You lie," he cried,

And ran on.

101 Great American Poems 

Dover Thrift Editions 1998

Edited by The American Poetry & Literacy Project (AP&L Project) Andrew Carroll  Joseph Brodsky

H. W. Longfellow (1807-1882): "The Arrow and The Song"

 

I shot an arrow into the air,

It fell to earth, I knew not where;

For, so swiftly it flew, the sight

Could not follow it in its flight.

I breathed a song into the air,

It fell to earth, I knew not where;

For who has sight so keen and strong,

That it can follow the flight of song?

Long, long afterward, in an oak

I found the arrow, still unbroke,

And the song, from beginning to end,

I found again in the heart of a friend.

101 Great American Poets

Dover Thrifts Editions 1998

Edited by The American Poetry & Literacy Project (AP&L Project)

Once upon a time ...

 

Emily Dickinson (1830 - 1886): 'Im nobody! Who are you?'

 

I'm nobody! Who are you?

Are you nobody, too?

Then there's a pair of us - don't tell!

They'd banish us, you know.

How dreary to be somebody!

How public, like a frog

To tell your name the livelong day

To an admiring bog!

101 Great American Poems

Dover Thrift Editions 1998

Edited by The American Poetry & Literacy Project (AP&L Project)

Stephen Vincent Benét

Adrienne Von Speyr

nothingness, limitedness, grace and GOD

... man's nothingness is overcome. It has been absorbed into holiness.  This indivisibility is GRACE, and it comes from GOD. GOD takes care of His own to the point of completely enveloping and covering them with His grace. But they are not buried underneath it, not lose their distinctive face, not paralyzed by the weight of an excessive giving.

Rather GRACE permeates, saturates and SETS AGLOW their entire being and places them in a new physical condition. ...

Limitedness,  does not stand in opposition to what GOD is and is capable of. After all, GOD created man in His image, and

an image can not be in contradiction to what it represents. ...