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

Talking Writing Monster’s Page –

Batty Writing – the bat’s idle chatter, thoughts, ideas and observations, all original, all fresh

Poems in English 

• Warm are the Still and Lucky Miles by W H Auden by Wystan Hugh Auden (W.H. Auden)
• Voltaire At Ferney by W H Auden by Wystan Hugh Auden (W.H. Auden)
• Underneath an Abject Willow by W H Auden by Wystan Hugh Auden (W.H. Auden)
• This Lunar Beauty by W H Auden by Wystan Hugh Auden (W.H. Auden)
• They Wondered Why the Fruit had Been Forbidden by W H Auden by Wystan Hugh Auden (W.H. Auden)
• The Waters by W H Auden by Wystan Hugh Auden (W.H. Auden)
• The Wanderer by W H Auden by Wystan Hugh Auden (W.H. Auden)
• The Two by W H Auden by Wystan Hugh Auden (W.H. Auden)
• The Riddle by W H Auden by Wystan Hugh Auden (W.H. Auden)
• The Quest by W H Auden by Wystan Hugh Auden (W.H. Auden)
• The Quest XII (Vocation) by W H Auden by Wystan Hugh Auden (W.H. Auden)
• The Novelist by W H Auden by Wystan Hugh Auden (W.H. Auden)
• The Labyrinth by W H Auden by Wystan Hugh Auden (W.H. Auden)
• The Hidden Law by W H Auden by Wystan Hugh Auden (W.H. Auden)
• The Geography of the House by W H Auden by Wystan Hugh Auden (W.H. Auden)
• The Dream by W H Auden by Wystan Hugh Auden (W.H. Auden)
• The Common Life by W H Auden by Wystan Hugh Auden (W.H. Auden)
• Thanksgiving for a Habitat by W H Auden by Wystan Hugh Auden (W.H. Auden)
• Taller To-day by W H Auden by Wystan Hugh Auden (W.H. Auden)
• Song Of The Master And Boatswain by W H Auden by Wystan Hugh Auden (W.H. Auden)

More external links (open in a new tab):

Russian Commerce Agency

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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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