An Eye for Eternity: Rune Music

Still Life by Evert Collier, 1675

“The Truth was there already to be true.”  — W. H. Auden, “The History of Truth”

by Peter Dreyer (February 2022)

 

Rune Music

 

I slide into the future with both feet.

Action I’d prefer, not passivity—

but passivity’s a rite of age,

and I’m at that latter stage.

 

So what is it, then, I go to greet?

How can I turn the turning page?

I’ll meet it when I’ve escaped my cage,

an ape en route to eternity.

 

Note: The poet W. H. Auden believed himself to be of Norse (Icelandic) descent; in legend, to gain knowledge of the Runic alphabet, the Norse (and more broadly Germanic) god of poetry and seers, Odin, sacrifices one of his eyes.

 

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Peter Richard Dreyer is a South African American writer. He is the author of A Beast in View (London: André Deutsch), The Future of Treason (New York: Ballantine), A Gardener Touched with Genius: The Life of Luther Burbank (New York: Coward, McCann & Geoghegan; rev. ed., Berkeley: University of California Press; new, expanded ed., Santa Rosa, CA: Luther Burbank Home & Gardens), Martyrs and Fanatics: South Africa and Human Destiny (New York: Simon & Schuster; London: Secker & Warburg), and most recently the novel Isacq (Charlottesville, VA: Hardware River Press, 2017).

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