Send forth the high falcon, by Léonie Adams (1899-1988)
(from Poems: A Selection. New York: The Noonday Press, 1959.)
Send forth the high falcon flying after the mind
Till it come toppling down from its cold cloud:
The beak of the falcon to pierce it till it fall
Where the simple heart is bowed.
O in wild innocence it rides
The rare ungovernable element,
But once it sways to terror and descent,
The marches of the wind are its abyss,
No wind staying it upward of the breast—
Let mind be proud for this,
And ignorant from what fabulous cause it dropt,
Or with how learned a gesture the unschooled heart
Shall lull both terror and innocence to rest.
***
Sen bjuder vi in kvällshöken som kan vaka in natten med oss.
Evening hawk, by Robert Penn Warren (1905-1989)
(from New and selected poems 1923-1985. New York : Random House, 1985.)
From plane of light to plane, wings dipping through
Geometries and orchids that the sunset builds,
Out of the peak’s black angularity of shadow, riding
The last tumultuous avalanche of
Light above pines and the guttural gorge,
The hawk comes.
His wing
Scythes down another day, his motion
Is that of the honed steel-edge, we hear
The crashless fall of stalks of Time.
The head of each stalk is heavy with the gold of our error.
Look! Look! he is climbing the last light
Who knows neither Time nor error, and under
Whose eye, unforgiving, the world, unforgiven, swings
Into shadow.
Long now,
The last thrush is still, the last bat
Now cruises in his sharp hieroglyphics. His wisdom
Is ancient, too, and immense. The star
Is steady, like Plato, over the mountain.
If there were no wind we might, we think, hear
The earth grind on its axis, or history
Drip in darkness like a leaking pipe in the cellar.
***
Sen vräker vråken in. Han kallas "Buzzard" bland engelsmän.
Buzzard, by John Stuart
(Published in the website: http://fireriverpoets.org.uk/)
She may have had prey on her mind swooping
round across the hedge over my shoulder.
Or was she heavy, weighed down already
with a dead or struggling weight? If I had known
and could have watched her coming
I would have marvelled at her insolence or gasped
at her parabola but I was flat surprised
and left with just the scaling
of her back, the hunched wings that vanished
over brambles and down the hill. I looked
as far as I could. She did not appear
at the valley floor. As I lifted the fork
again and turned it round, I had a sense
of her turning for home in strong, slow time.
***
Och slutligen härföraren, den amerikanska nationalsymbolen, Örnen.
The Eagle, by Lord Alfred Tennyson (1809-1892)
(First published 1851.)
He clasps the crag with crooked hands;
Close to the sun in lonely lands,
Ring'd with the azure world, he stands.
The wrinkled sea beneath him crawls;
He watches from his mountain walls,
And like a thunderbolt he falls.
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