Gratitude of flight!... These made of it their joy.
Over all reaches of leisurely time and delectable space, they luxuriate in their leisure and delectation: birds of the longest day and the longest grievance...
They more than fly, they come wholly to the delight of being: birds of the longest day and the longest resolve, with brows like new-born infants or the dolphins in old fables...
They fly past, and so endure, or soar, and so reign: birds of the longest day and the longest desire... Nourishing space opens to them its carnal depth, and their maturity awakens in the very bed of the wind.
Gratitude of flight!... And the stretch of long desire is such, and of such power, as to impart to them at times that warping of the wing that one may see, deep in austral nights, in the failing armature of the Southern Cross...
Long luxuriance and long muteness... No whistling of slings or scythes up there. They were already sailing with all lights out, when the deafness of the gods descended on them...
And who ever knew whether drunkenness or the spasm of pleasure kept their eyes half closed, under those tripled eyelids tinted slate-grey? An effusion becomes a permanence, and the immersion a total one...
At mid-height between sky and sea, between the upper and lower waters of eternity, clearing the way of eternity, they are mediators for us and strive with all their being to the utmost of being...
Their line of flight makes latitude, in the image of time as we arrange it. They are always passing across our dream, like locusts before our eyes... Through endless time they follow their shadowless tracks, and at the height of noon they hide in the shade of their wings, as kings and prophets shield their grieving hearts.
SAINT-JOHN PERSE
excerpt from "Birds"
from Collected Poems
Translation by Robert Fitzgerald
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