Meditation on a Bone

A piece of bone, found at Trondhjem in 1901, with the following runic inscription (about A.D. 1050) cut on it: I loved her as a maiden; I will not trouble Erlend’s detestable wife; better she should be a widow.

Words scored upon a bone,

Scratched in despair or rage —

Nine hundred years have gone;

Now, in another age,

They burn with passion on

A scholar’s tranquil page.

The scholar takes his pen

And turns the bone about,

And writes those words again.

Once more they seethe and shout

And through a human brain

Undying hate rings out.

“I loved her when a maid;

I loathe and love the wife

That warms another’s bed:

Let him beware his life!”

The scholar’s hand is stayed;

His pen becomes a knife

To grave in living bone

The fierce archaic cry.

He sits and reads his own

Dull sum of misery.

A thousand years have flown

Before that ink is dry.

And, in a foreign tongue,

A man, who is not he,

Reads and his heart is wrung

This ancient grief to see,

And thinks: When I am dung,

What bone shall speak for me?

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Poems in English 

• La Nue by Alan Seeger
• Kyrenaikos by Alan Seeger
• Juvenilia An Ode To Natural Beauty by Alan Seeger
• I Loved by Alan Seeger
• I Have A Rendezvous With Death by Alan Seeger
• Fragments by Alan Seeger
• Eudaemon by Alan Seeger
• El Extraviado by Alan Seeger
• Do You Remember Once by Alan Seeger
• Coucy by Alan Seeger
• Champagne 1914 15 by Alan Seeger
• Broceliande by Alan Seeger
• Bellinglise by Alan Seeger
• At The Tomb Of Napoleon by Alan Seeger
• Ariosto Orlando Furioso Canto X 91 99 by Alan Seeger
• Antinous by Alan Seeger
• An Ode To Antares by Alan Seeger
• All Thats Not Love by Alan Seeger
• After An Epigram Of Clement Marot by Alan Seeger
• A Message To America by Alan Seeger

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Doska or the Board – write anything

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Duckduckgo – the real alternative and a search engine that actually works. Without much censorship or partisan politics.

Yahoo– yes, it’s still around, amazingly, miraculously, incredibly, but now it seems to be powered by Bing.

 

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