ᛗ byþ on myrgþe his magan leof.
sceal þeah anra gehwylc oðrum swican.
for ðam dryhten wyle dome sine
ꝥ earme flæsc eorþan betæcan ᛬᛫
In mirth they are loved by their kin
Though each and every one must depart from the other
For the gods will by their judgement,
That wretched body, entrust to the earth.
In Old English, a mann is a human being of any gender, translated into modern English as anyone, they, people, a citizen, a human. Mann is not a male person here, so when you see Mann as the name of this rune, it does not mean man as in male. Most correctly it can be either Person or Human but I need to pick one: Human. Person says more about ourselves as bodies. We carry things on our person, we are a person in a room. We are also a human in a room, but we do have a collective human nature, a human understanding, and human sensibilities. Human is a word that suggests the connection we have from our shared experience of being people in the world. It’s a choice that feels right to me as an answer to the riddle of the stanza. Maybe I’m wrong. As a person I’m only human.… More
Lord what fools these mortals be
Wondering at spectrality.
What is our modality?
Are we duality or plurality?
Or some sort of totality?
And where is our locality?
Ignoring their own finality
(Life is a fatality).
Why so much brutality?
What is this mentality?
Forgive me a legality
But life is for vitality.
Playing games with lethality,
How is this normality?
Better brush up on morality,
Find some commonality,
(Or at least some cordiality).
Wake up and smell reality,
Mortality is factuality.
Be happy, your people love you, especially when you are happy. Enjoy each other now because everybody will die. When will you depart, one from the other? O I couldn’t tell you that. That’s not for us to know.
Send out some air and impede it a bit with your vocal cords, press your lips together and send that air through your nose. Smell that? Mmmmm. Delicious.
Carve the rune for joy and give it company: its spitting image, like looking in a mirror. Like the rest of us, they love to be happy together.
