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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External links

Bat’s Poetry Page – more poetry by Fledermaus

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Poems in English 

• In the Home Stretch by Robert Frost by Robert Frost
• In Neglect by Robert Frost by Robert Frost
• In Hardwood Groves by Robert Frost by Robert Frost
• In a Vale by Robert Frost by Robert Frost
• In a Disused Graveyard by Robert Frost by Robert Frost
• Immigrants by Robert Frost by Robert Frost
• II. The Pauper Witch of Grafton by Robert Frost by Robert Frost
• I Will Sing You One-O by Robert Frost by Robert Frost
• I. The Witch of Coös by Robert Frost by Robert Frost
• Hyla Brook by Robert Frost by Robert Frost
• Home Burial by Robert Frost by Robert Frost
• Hannibal by Robert Frost by Robert Frost
• Good Hours by Robert Frost by Robert Frost
• Good-by and Keep Cold by Robert Frost by Robert Frost
• Going for Water by Robert Frost by Robert Frost
• Ghost House by Robert Frost by Robert Frost
• Gathering Leaves by Robert Frost by Robert Frost
• Fragmentary Blue by Robert Frost by Robert Frost
• For Once, Then, Something by Robert Frost by Robert Frost
• Flower-Gathering by Robert Frost by Robert Frost

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Doska or the Board – write anything

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Yandex – the best search engine for searches in Russian (and the best overall image search engine, in any language, anywhere)

Qwant – the best search engine for searches in French, German as well as Romance and Germanic languages.

Ecosia – a search engine that supposedly… plants trees

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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