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 

• Screw-Guns by Rudyard Kipling by Rudyard Kipling
• Russia To The Pacifists by Rudyard Kipling by Rudyard Kipling
• Route Marchin’ by Rudyard Kipling by Rudyard Kipling
• Romulus and Remus by Rudyard Kipling by Rudyard Kipling
• Road-Song of the Bandar-Log by Rudyard Kipling by Rudyard Kipling
• Rimmon by Rudyard Kipling by Rudyard Kipling
• Rimini by Rudyard Kipling by Rudyard Kipling
• Recessional (A Victorian Ode) by Rudyard Kipling by Rudyard Kipling
• Recessional by Rudyard Kipling by Rudyard Kipling
• Rebirth by Rudyard Kipling by Rudyard Kipling
• Puck’s Song by Rudyard Kipling by Rudyard Kipling
• Public Waste by Rudyard Kipling by Rudyard Kipling
• Prophets at Home by Rudyard Kipling by Rudyard Kipling
• Prelude by Rudyard Kipling by Rudyard Kipling
• Possibilities by Rudyard Kipling by Rudyard Kipling
• Poor Honest Men by Rudyard Kipling by Rudyard Kipling
• Philadelphia by Rudyard Kipling by Rudyard Kipling
• Pagett, M.P. by Rudyard Kipling by Rudyard Kipling
• Outsong in the Jungle by Rudyard Kipling by Rudyard Kipling
• Our Fathers Also by Rudyard Kipling by Rudyard Kipling

More external links (open in a new tab):

Russian Commerce Agency

Dealing Monster

Doska or the Board – write anything

Search engines:

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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