A poem by Alec Derwent-Hope (1907–2000)
by Alec Derwent Hope
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.

A few random poems:
- Sonnet LIII by William Shakespeare
- Анатолий Жигулин – Ночная смена
- Who’s Who by W H Auden
- Владислав Ходасевич – Окна во двор
- I am a sculptor, a molder of form by Jalal ad-Din Muhammad Rumi
- Most Sweet it is by William Wordsworth
- Forty Years Later by Martin Willitts, Jr
- Meditations In Time Of Civil War by William Butler Yeats
- A love song poem – Yehudah ha-Levi poems | Poetry Monster
- Sonnet LXVI by William Shakespeare
- Валерий Брюсов – Город сестер любви видение
- Ageing Schoolmaster by Vernon Scannell
- Masks poem – Ezra Pound poems
- Олег Бундур – Тропа
- Passion makes the old medicine new: by Jalal ad-Din Muhammad Rumi
External links
Bat’s Poetry Page – more poetry by Fledermaus
Talking Writing Monster’s Page –
Batty Writing – the bat’s idle chatter, thoughts, ideas and observations, all original, all fresh
Poems in English
- My Eyes in the Time of Apparition by Rachel McKibbens
- Mrs. Mouse has glasses by R. L. KARLOWSKY
- Mother by Sachin Yadav (Pen Name: Rahul Nachhiketa)
- Most Precious by R. L. Karlowsky
- Minneapolipstick by Rachel McKibbens
- Meditation by Radames Antonio Cruz
- Manipulation by Radames Antonio Cruz
- intertwined by rachel wright
- I Hardly Remember by Rafael Guillen
- Homecoming of Love on the Sands by Rafael Alberti
- Hex by Rachel McKibbens
- From Marinero en tierra by Rafael Alberti
- EVENING… by R.M. Engelhardt
- El Cafetal by Rafael Guillen
- Across the Street from the Whitmore Home for Girls, 1949 by Rachel McKibbens
- zen: a very short history by Raj Arumugam
- you witness my dying by Raj Arumugam
- you say you love the earth by Raj Arumugam
- you are there moon by Raj Arumugam
- word of God by Raj Arumugam
More external links (open in a new tab):
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.
Parallel Translations of Poetry
The Poetry Repository – an online library of poems, poetry, verse and poetic works
Alec Derwent-Hope (1907–2000) was an Australian poet and essayist known for his satirical slant. He was also a critic, teacher and academic.