Beyond Land and Time

The Birds

(Pākhirā)

Translated by Marian Maddern

My eyes will not be veiled in sleep.

In the spring night

I lie on my bed;

—how night has deepened!

To the side, the sound of the sea’s voice,

above, the skylight,

and in the air beyond, birds converse

and wander who knows where in the sky?

Their wings’ fragrance drifts down the wind.

Spring night sweetness quickens my flesh

and my eyes no more wish to sleep.

Starlight falls from the window.

In the ocean wind

is my heart’s ease.

All around me people sleep.

Who now casts anchor on this sea-shore?

Beyond the sea and its far shore

these birds were once

on some polar hill.

Blizzard-pursued in flocks across the ocean

they came falling.

As a man falls to the unknowingness of his death.

Tawny and golden and white—within their speckled wings

like rubber balls in their small breasts

was their life—

as fathomless and true

as is death spread like a thousand miles of ocean.

Tossed balls, their hearts remember

a place of life, suffused with life’s breath,

where river-water runs and not the sea’s bitter foam.

To this place of hope,

past all dominion of the falling snows,

they have come.

Then to some field;

and now, flying with their mates on the sky’s paths,

what do they say?

That it is time for their first egg to hatch.

Long and long their sea-salt struggle to this earth-scent—love, then, and love’s offspring,

this nesting—

poignantly sweet.

Now in the spring night

my eyes will not be veiled in sleep.

To the side, the sound of the sea’s voice,

above, the skylight,

and in the air beyond, birds converse.