Good Tidings to you, and a very blessed and holy Lent!
I have today a poem for you that I wrote not too terribly long ago, but which seemed appropriate both to fill the void in my rather sporadic posting and also to acknowledge this penitential season. (As to the latter - can you guess why? Read it and see if you can decipher what I refer to! ... And yes, I am incorrigible when it comes to riddles. I turn everything into riddles. Come to think of it, I am a riddle... but that subject I shall leave be as potential fodder for another post.)
Happy reading, then, and God be with ye!
+JMJ
Night in Heorot
By
Caitlin Clancy
Copyright
2013
“About times and
dates, brothers, there is no need to write to you for you are well aware in any
case that the Day of the Lord is going to come like a thief in the night. It is when
people are saying, 'How quiet and peaceful it is' that sudden destruction falls
on them, as suddenly as labour pains come on a
pregnant woman; and there is no escape.”
–
I Thessalonians
5:1-3[1]
In a bygone age, our schoolboys read,
Good Hrothgar drunk his mead;
Beowulf rent mad Grendel’s arm
And gold was sowed like seed
In long-gone years we waged our fight
With battlements and spears,
But now we, spent, are moved to write
And war with unshed tears
The doom,
The doom,
The doom of our time
Is knocking at the gates –
And woe to the one who heeds not the war
And woe to the one who casts open the door
And fool be the one who tries to ignore
The flame-sword that God creates[2]
No fanfare greets the suited man
Who, nervous, tugs his tie;
No horn is blown for skirmish unknown
Where boys, silent, bleed and die –
Before the walls that never were,
But here that ought have been,
Under the red of a flashing sign
Behold the carrion birds again
And souls that learned not to cry
The doom,
The doom,
The doom of our time
Is found at the heart of the home:
It festers in the deep of a look
It billows large from the thoughts of a book
Its meaning moves with the castle-rook
Or the words soft-read from the tome
Though no sorcerer here
His magic works and
No dragon his fire blasts,
Yet some of the waves upon the earth
Come not out of the sea
And some of the ones who rise and walk
Are born unnaturally
And some still lurk in the close–cropped verge
And eye those going past –
Yea, and behold, the monsters still rise
From up out of the grass!
The doom,
The doom,
The doom of our time
Comes not in battle array
It looks not to put upon hearts its fear
Nor seeks to make stallions charge back and rear
And tears not from mothers a wishful tear
But rends us now twain with cold thoughtless steel
Swung silent in the fray
Listener, be watchful; take back with you
This caution, this thought, this word –
That not all you feel and think and do
Is distant from what you have heard
Remember that good gold given well
Can snatch a soul from the depths of hell
Remember that fealty to one’s lord
Has worth above the dark world’s fjord
Remember the fate of Volsung’s young
And that some deeds are best left unsung
And, above all, by our God who forgives,
Remember, remember that Grendel lives!
