It is always interesting to hear renderings of bird calls. I can just
about manage to make out the 'Sweet Pretty Creature' in the call of the
Willy Wagtail that probably lives somewhere in front of the Physics
building. Anyway, I came across the following American poem written before
1955, and would be interested if anyone could identify the bird (I
apologise if the exercise seems frivolous):
A bird that I don't know,
Hunched on his light-pole like a scarecrow,
Looks sideways out into the wheat
The wind waves under the waves of heat.
The field is yellow as egg-bread dough
Except where (just as though they'd let
It live for looks) a locust billows
In leaf-green and shade-violet.
The bird calls twice, "*Red* clay, *red* clay";
Or else he's saying, "Directly, directly."
If someone came by I could ask,
Around here all of them must know-
And why they live so and die so-
Or why, for once, the lagging heron
Flaps from the little creek's parched cresses
Across the harsh-grassed, gullied meadow
To the black, rowed evergreens below.
(A Country Life, Randall Jarrell)
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Kiran Krishna
3rd yr physics
(Falkiner High Energy Physics)
University of Sydney
NSW 2006
--------------------------------------------
Home is so sad. It stays as it was left,
Shaped to the comfort of the last to go
As if to win them back. Instead, bereft
Of anyone to please, it withers so,
Having no heart to put aside the theft
And turn again to what it started as,
A joyous shot at how things ought to be,
Long fallen wide. You can see how it was:
Look at the pictures and the cutlery.
The music in the piano stool. That vase.
- Home is so sad, Philip Larkin
http://www.physics.usyd.edu.au/hienergy
http://www.physics.usyd.edu.au/~kiran
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