The bird, most ardent for life of all our blood kin, lives out a singular destiny on the frontier of day. As a migrant whom the sun's inflation haunts, he journeys by night because the days are too short for him. In times of grey moon, grey as mistletoe of the Gauls, he peoples with his ghost the prophecy of the nights. And his cry in the night is a cry of dawn itself; a cry of holy war and naked steel.
On the cross-beam of his wings is the vast balancing of a double season, and under the curve of his flight the very curvature of the earth... Alternation is his law, ambiguity his reign. In the space and time that he broods over in one flight, a single summering is heresy. It is likewise the scandal of painter and poet, who bring seasons together at that height where all intersect.
Austerity of flight!... Most avid for existence of all who share our table, the bird is he who bears hidden in himself, to nourish his passion, the highest fever of the blood. His grace is in that burning. Nothing symbolic about this: it is a simple biological fact. And so light in our view is the stuff of birds, that against the fire of day it seems to reach incandescence. A man at sea, feeling noon in the air, lifts his head at this wonder: a white gull opened on the sky; like a woman's hand before the flame of a lamp, elevating in daylight the pink translucence of a host, a wafer's whiteness.
Sickle-shaped wing of dream, you will find us again this evening on other shores!
SAINT-JOHN PERSE
excerpt from "Birds"
from Collected Poems
Translation by Robert Fitzgerald
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