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:
- Федор Сологуб – Скупа Филис, но пыл мятежный
- Prison Souvenirs, Translation of Paul Verlaine’s poem: Prière by T. Wignesan.
- Владимир Ступкин – Тоска
- Just Thinking by William Stafford
- Николай Карамзин – Эпитафия (Он жил в сем мире для того)
- Юрий Калугин – Счастье любит тишину
- Robert Burns: Epistle To Hugh Parker:
- Minimalism And The Elm Choka
- Thrones In Heaven by Victoria Rose
- Birds Calling in the Ravine by Wang Wei
- Владимир Луговской – Звезда (Я знаю ты любишь меня)
- In Memory Of Eva Gore-Booth And Con Markiewicz by William Butler Yeats
- Владимир Высоцкий – Марш студентов-физиков
- The Nymph Complaining For The Death Of Her Faun poem – Andrew Marvell poems
- Robert Burns: The Whistle -A Ballad:
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
- I Heard You, Solemn-sweet Pipes of the Organ. by Walt Whitman
- I hear it was Charged against Me. by Walt Whitman
- I Hear America Singing. by Walt Whitman
- I Dream’d in a Dream. by Walt Whitman
- I am He that Aches with Love. by Walt Whitman
- Hush’d be the Camps To-day. by Walt Whitman
- How Solemn as One by One. by Walt Whitman
- Hours Continuing Long. by Walt Whitman
- Here the Frailest Leaves of Me. by Walt Whitman
- Here, Sailor. by Walt Whitman
- Hast Never Come to Thee an Hour. by Walt Whitman
- Great are the Myths. by Walt Whitman
- Gods. by Walt Whitman
- Gliding Over All. by Walt Whitman
- Give me the Splendid, Silent Sun. by Walt Whitman
- Germs. by Walt Whitman
- Full of Life, Now. by Walt Whitman
- From Paumanok Starting. by Walt Whitman
- From My Last Years. by Walt Whitman
- From Far Dakota’s Cañons. by Walt Whitman
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.