Three nights they heard the curlew cry.
It is the warning known of old
That tells them one tonight shall die.
Brother and friend, he comes and goes
Out of the Shadow Land to them,
The loneliest voice that earth knows.
He guards the welfare of his own,
He comes to lead each soul away —
To what dim world, what strange unknown?
Who is it that tonight must go:
The old blind one? The cripple child?
Tomorrow all the camp will know.
The poor dead will be less afraid,
Their tribe brother will be with him
When the dread journey must be made.
‘Have courage, death is not an end,’
He seems to say. ‘Though you must weep,
Death is kindly and is your friend.’
Three nights the curlew cried. Once more
He comes to take the timorous dead —
To what grim change, what ghostly shore?
The echoes of light
travelled the slopes
with the swallows.
In the throne room, the griffins
their peacock heads raised
were waiting
in a field of white lilies
for the god, the youth
with the crown of plumed gold.
The breath of the hills
fell and rose in the silence
under the powdered sky.
The kingfisher rises out of the black wave
like a blue flower, in his beak
he carries a silver leaf. I think this is
the prettiest world–so long as you don’t mind
a little dying, how could there be a day in your
whole life
that doesn’t have its splash of happiness?
There are more fish than there are leaves
on a thousand trees, and anyway the kingfisher
wasn’t born to think about it, or anything else.
When the wave snaps shut over his blue head, the
water
remains water–hunger is the only story
he has ever heard in his life that he could
believe.
I don’t say he’s right. Neither
do I say he’s wrong. Religiously he swallows the
silver leaf
with its broken red river, and with a rough and
easy cry
I couldn’t rouse out of my thoughtful body
if my life depended on it, he swings back
over the bright sea to do the same thing, to do it
(as I long to do something, anything) perfectly.
Spacefarers past living planetfall
on our ever-dive in bloom crystal:
when about our self kin selves appear,
slowing, rubber to pulp, we slack from spear,
flower anemone, re-clasp and hang, welling
while the design of play is jelling,
then enfolding space, jet
every way to posit some essential set
of life-streaks in the placeless,
or we commune parallel, rouge to cerulean
as odd proposals of shape and zip floresce
—till a jag-maw apparition
spurts us apart into vague as our colours shrink,
leaving, of our culture, an ectoplasm of ink.