"Fate goes ever as fate must."

--Beowulf, trans. Seamus Heaney

**

Here in central Maine, on the nominal first weekend of summer, the thermometer stands at 30 degrees, the skies are the alien blue of a white cat's eyes, and a wild cold gale is tearing at the buds and blossoms.

**

I dreamed a poem last night, a poem full of anger and wind.

**

"Time and again, when the goblets passed
and seasoned fighters got flushed with beer
they would pledge themselves to protect Heorot
and wait for Grendel with whetted swords.
But when dawn broke and day crept in
over each empty, blood-spattered bench,
the floor would be slick with slaughter. And so they died,
faithful retainers, and my following dwindled."

--Beowulf, trans. Seamus Heaney

**

"Exactly right takes many, many elements into account: definition, connotation, sound, cadence, visual appearance, even the poet’s private associations with the word. For instance, if you were to note the words dawn or sunrise or rosy-fingered in my poems, you would not be wrong to suspect a personal resonance, any more than I am wrong to suspect a parallel resonance in Robert Frost’s many references to snow and ice. Our names, after all, are among the oldest echoes in our own minds. 'Where was the child I was, / still inside me or gone?' asked Pablo Neruda in The Book of Questions."

--Dawn Potter, The Conversation: Learning to Be a Poet

**

"But when dawn broke and day crept in

over each empty blood-spattered bench,

the floor would be slick with slaughter."

**

"Where was the child I was,

still inside me or gone?"