Fiskmåsar är inga populära djur, förutom i poeternas värld.
The Ballet Of The Fifth Year, by Delmore Schwartz
(From Selected poems: Summer Knowledge. New Directions Publishing Corp., 1938.)
Where the sea gulls sleep or indeed where they fly
Is a place of different traffic. Although I
Consider the fishing bay (where I see them dip and curve
And purely glide) a place that weakens the nerve
Of will, and closes my eyes, as they should not be
(They should burn like the street-light all night quietly,
So that whatever is present will be known to me),
Nevertheless the gulls and the imagination
Of where they sleep, which comes to creation
In strict shape and color, from their dallying
Their wings slowly, and suddenly rallying
Over, up, down the arabesque of descent,
Is an old act enacted, my fabulous intent
When I skated, afraid of policemen, five years old,
In the winter sunset, sorrowful and cold,
Hardly attained to thought, but old enough to know
Such grace, so self-contained, was the best escape to know.
***
Vi fortsätter med den underbara Ted Hughes och hans dikt om tärnan.
Tern, by Ted Hughes
(From Selected poems. Harlow, Essex Longman [u.a.] 1994.)
The breaker humps its green glass.
You see the sunrise through it, the wrack dark in it,
And over it - the bird of sickles
Swimming in the wind, with oiled spasm.
That is the tern. A blood-tipped harpoon
Hollow-ground in the roller-dazzle,
Honed in the wind-flash, polished
By his own expertise -
Now finished and in use.
The wings - remote-controlled
By the eyes
In his submarine swift shadow
Feint and tilt in their steel.
Suddenly a triggered magnet
Connects him downward, through a thin shatter,
To a sand-eel. He hoists out, with a twinkling,
Through some other wave-window.
His eye is a gimlet.
Deep in the churned grain of the roller
His brain is a gimlet. He hangs,
A blown tatter, a precarious word
In the mouth of ocean pronouncements.
His meaning has no margin. He shudders
To the tips of his tail-tines.
Momentarily, his lit scrap is a shriek.
***
Vi rundar av med en rolig och annorlunda kortdikt om en alkfågel ('auk' på engelska).
An auk in flight, by Jack Prelutsky
(From Beauty of the beast : poems. New York : Alfred A. Knopf : Distributed by Random House, 1997.)
An auk in flight
is sheer delight,
it soars above the sea.
An auk on land
is not so grand--
an auk walks aukwardly.
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