O bright, O swift and bright, you flashing among pandanus boughs (is that right? pandanus?) under the great banyan, in and out the dusky delicate bamboo groves (yes? banyan, bamboo?) low, wide-winged, gliding over the wetlands and drylands (but I have not seen you, I do not know your names, I do not know what I am talking about). I have seen the road runner and the golden eagle, the great white heron and the Kirtland's warbler, our own endangered species, and I have worried about them. I have worried about all our own, seen and unseen, whooping cranes, condors, white-tailed kites, and the ivory-bills (certainly gone, all gone!) the ones we have harried, murdered, driven away as if we were the Appointed Avengers, the Destroyers, the Wrathful Ones out of our ancestors' offended hearts at the cruel beginning of the world. But for what? for whom? why? Nobody knows. And why, in my image of that cindered country, should I waste my mourning? I will never have enough. Think of the children there, insane little crusted kids at the beckoning fire, think of the older ones, burned, crazy with fear, sensible beings who can know hell, think of their minds exploding, their hearts flaming. I do think. But today, O mindless, O heartless, in and out the dusky delicate groves, your hell becomes mine, simply and without thought, you maimed, you poisoned in your nests, starved in the withered forests. O mindless, heartless, you never invented hell. We say flesh turns to dust, though more often a man-corpse or woman-corpse is a bloody pulp, and a bird-corpse too, yet your feathers retain life's color long afterward, even in the robes of barbarous kings, still golden the trogon feather, still bright the egret plume, and the crest of the bower bird will endure forever almost. You will always remind us of what the earth has been. O bright, swift, gleaming in dusky groves, I mourn you. O mindless, heartless, I can't help it, I have so loved this world. Used with the permission of Copper Canyon Press, P.O. Box 271, Port Townsend, WA 98368-0271, www.cc.press.org | Discover our Poem Explanations and Poet Analyses!Other Poems of Interest...TO DANTE by VITTORIO AMEDEO ALFIERI THE CHILDREN by CHARLES MONROE DICKINSON THE EMULATION by SARAH FYGE EGERTON A NEWPORT ROMANCE by FRANCIS BRET HARTE MAIDEN MELANCHOLY by RAINER MARIA RILKE A WISH by CHRISTINA GEORGINA ROSSETTI PORTRAIT OF A LADY by WILLIAM CARLOS WILLIAMS THE SULTANA by THOMAS BAILEY ALDRICH A SONG OF LABOUR; DEDICATED TO MY FELLOW-WORKERS WITH PICK AND SHOVEL by ALEXANDER ANDERSON |