For my birthday on the ides of March 2000, Lester gave me a gift. It was Seamus Heaney's translation of Beowulf. It was Lester's idea, at the end of one millennium and in anticipation of another, that in the future we would have fun deciphering the Anglo-Saxon, comparing text and translation, savoring the poetry, mining the ancient, alloying it with the new. Fate had other ideas. Our anticipated dialogues were not to be! In lieu, therefore, of that dialogue, I offer in Lester's memory some thoughts about a poem written more than a thousand years ago, a text that addresses fate, courage, fear, rivalry, envy, grief, war, and death in an ancient voice that manages, however, not merely to represent the past but to speak to the present with an uncanny immediacy and resonance. If the dominion of death cannot be undone, the dominion of poetry plants its defiant stake in the earth, an affirming of life even when “the bone house” of flesh has fled.