A Bird Came Down

7/27/2019 A Bird Came Down

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A Bird Came Down

Emily DickinsonA bird came down the walk:He did not know I saw;He bit an angle-worm in halvesAnd ate the fellow, raw.

And then he drank a dewFrom a convenient grass,And then hopped sidewise to the wallTo let a beetle pass.

He glanced with rapid eyesThat hurried all abroad,--They looked like frightened beads, I thought;He stirred his velvet head

Like one in danger; cautious,I offered him a crumb,And he unrolled his feathersAnd rowed him softer home

Than oars divide the ocean,Too silver for a seam,Or butterflies, off banks of noon,Leap, splashless, as they swim.

A Crazed Girl

William Butler Yeats

THAT crazed girl improvising her music.Her poetry, dancing upon the shore,

Her soul in division from itselfClimbing, falling She knew not where,Hiding amid the cargo of a steamship,Her knee-cap broken, that girl I declareA beautiful lofty thing, or a thingHeroically lost, heroically found.

No matter what disaster occurredShe stood in desperate music wound,Wound, wound, and she made in her triumphWhere the bales and the baskets lay


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No common intelligible soundBut sang, 'O sea-starved, hungry sea.'

After the Funeral (In memory of Ann Jones)

Dylan Thomas

After the funeral, mule praises, brays,Windshake of sailshaped ears, muffle-toed tapTap happily of one peg in the thickGrave's foot, blinds down the lids, the teeth in black,The spittled eyes, the salt ponds in the sleeves,Morning smack of the spade that wakes up sleep,Shakes a desolate boy who slits his throatIn the dark of the coffin and sheds dry leaves,That breaks one bone to light with a judgment clout'

After the feast of tear-stuffed time and thistlesIn a room with a stuffed fox and a stale fern,I stand, for this memorial's sake, aloneIn the snivelling hours with dead, humped AnnWhose hodded, fountain heart once fell in puddlesRound the parched worlds of Wales and drowned each sun(Though this for her is a monstrous image blindlyMagnified out of praise; her death was a still drop;She would not have me sinking in the holyFlood of her heart's fame; she would lie dumb and deepAnd need no druid of her broken body).But I, Ann's bard on a raised hearth, call all

The seas to service that her wood-tongud virtueBabble like a bellbuoy over the hymning heads,Bow down the walls of the ferned and foxy woodsThat her love sing and swing through a brown chapel,Blees her bent spirit with four, crossing birds.Her flesh was meek as milk, but this skyward statueWith the wild breast and blessed and giant skullIs carved from her in a room with a wet windowIn a fiercely mourning house in a crooked year.I know her scrubbed and sour humble handsLie with religion in their cramp, her threadbareWhisper in a damp word, her wits drilled hollow,Her fist of a face died clenched on a round pain;And sculptured Ann is seventy years of stone.These cloud-sopped, marble hands, this monumentalArgument of the hewn voice, gesture and psalmStorm me forever over her grave untilThe stuffed lung of the fox twitch and cry LoveAnd the strutting fern lay seeds on the black sill.


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Don Quixote

Nazim Hikmet

The knight of immortal youth

at the age of fifty found his mind in his heartand on July morning went out to capturethe right, the beautiful, the just.

Facing him a world of silly and arrogant giants,he on his sad but brave Rocinante.I know what it means to be longing for something,but if your heart weighs only a pound and sixteen ounces,there's no sense, my Don, in fighting these senseless windmills.

But you are right, of course, Dulcinea is your woman,the most beautiful in the world;I'm sure you'll shout this factat the face of street-traders;but they'll pull you down from your horseand beat you up.But you, the unbeatable knight of our curse,will continue to glow behind the heavy iron visorand Dulcinea will become even more beautiful.

Translated by Taner Baybars

AloneMaya Angelou

Lying, thinkingLast nightHow to find my soul a homeWhere water is not thirstyAnd bread loaf is not stoneI came up with one thingAnd I don't believe I'm wrongThat nobody,

But nobodyCan make it out here alone.

Alone, all aloneNobody, but nobodyCan make it out here alone.

There are some millionairesWith money they can't useTheir wives run round like bansheesTheir children sing the bluesThey've got expensive doctors

To cure their hearts of stone.But nobodyNo, nobody


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Can make it out here alone.

Alone, all aloneNobody, but nobodyCan make it out here alone.

Now if you listen closelyI'll tell you what I knowStorm clouds are gatheringThe wind is gonna blowThe race of man is sufferingAnd I can hear the moan,'Cause nobody,But nobodyCan make it out here alone.

Alone, all aloneNobody, but nobody

Can make it out here alone.

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A Bird Came Down