Death of the Bird

For every bird there is this last migration;

Once more the cooling year kindles her heart;

With a warm passage to the summer station

Love pricks the course in lights across the chart.

Year after year a speck on the map, divided

By a whole hemisphere, summons her to come;

Season after season, sure and safely guided,

Going away she is also coming home.

And being home, memory becomes a passion

With which she feeds her brood and straws her nest,

Aware of ghosts that haunt the heart’s possession

And exiled love mourning within the breast.

The sands are green with a mirage of valleys;

The palm tree casts a shadow not its own;

Down the long architrave of temple or palace

Blows a cool air from moorland scarps of stone.

And day by day the whisper of love grows stronger;

That delicate voice, more urgent with despair,

Custom and fear constraining her no longer,

Drives her at last on the waste leagues of air.

A vanishing speck in those inane dominions,

Single and frail, uncertain of her place,

Alone in the bright host of her companions,

Lost in the blue unfriendliness of space.

She feels it close now, the appointed season;

The invisible thread is broken as she flies;

Suddenly, without warning, without reason,

The guiding spark of instinct winks and dies.

Try as she will, the trackless world delivers

No way, the wilderness of light no sign;

Immense,complex contours of hills and rivers

Mock her small wisdom with their vast design.

The darkness rises from the eastern valleys,

And the winds buffet her with their hungry breath,

And the great earth, with neither grief nor malice,

Receives the tiny burden of her death.

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Poems in English 

• Parabola by Alec Derwent-Hope
• Observation Car by Alec Derwent-Hope
• Morning Coffee by Alec Derwent-Hope
• Meditation on a Bone by Alec Derwent-Hope
• Easter Hymn by Alec Derwent-Hope
• Death of the Bird by Alec Derwent-Hope
• Crossing the Frontier by Alec Derwent-Hope
• Conquistador by Alec Derwent-Hope
• Commination by Alec Derwent-Hope
• Australia by Alec Derwent-Hope
• Winter Dream poem – Aldous Huxley poems | Poetry Monster by Aldous Huxley
• Waking poem – Aldous Huxley poems | Poetry Monster by Aldous Huxley
• Vision poem – Aldous Huxley poems | Poetry Monster by Aldous Huxley
• Valedictory poem – Aldous Huxley poems | Poetry Monster by Aldous Huxley
• Topiary poem – Aldous Huxley poems | Poetry Monster by Aldous Huxley
• The Reef poem – Aldous Huxley poems | Poetry Monster by Aldous Huxley
• The Louse-Hunters poem – Aldous Huxley poems | Poetry Monster by Aldous Huxley
• The Life Theoretic poem – Aldous Huxley poems | Poetry Monster by Aldous Huxley
• The Flowers poem – Aldous Huxley poems | Poetry Monster by Aldous Huxley
• The Elms poem – Aldous Huxley poems | Poetry Monster by Aldous Huxley

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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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