Death in the Afternoon

Here his mate is injured and her condition is grave.

He brought her food and attended to her with love and compassion.

Shocked at her death he tries to move her.

Aware that his sweetheart is dead and will never

come back to him, he cries with adoring love.

None know how long he stood beside her and cried,

devastated by the loss.

Finally, aware that she would never return to him, he stands

beside her lifeless body in sadness and sorrow.

Millions of people cried after viewing these photos throughout America, Europe and India . It is said that the photographer sold these pictures for a nominal fee to the most famous newspaper in France. All copies of that newspaper were sold out on the day these pictures were published. And some people think animals don't have a brain or feelings.......... Do animals have souls????

*****

The Death Of The Bird

For every bird there is this last migration;

Once more the cooling year kindles her heart;

With a warm passage to the summer station

Love pricks the course in lights across the chart.

Year after year a speck on the map divided

By a whole hemisphere, summons her to come;

Season after season, sure and safely guided,

Going away she is also coming home;

And being home, memory becomes a passion

With which she feeds her brood and straws her nest;

Aware of ghosts that haunt the heart's possession

And exiled love mourning within the breast.

The sands are green with a mirage of valleys;

The palm-tree casts a shadow not its own;

Down the long architrave of temple or palace

Blows a cool air from moorland scraps of stone.

And day by day the whisper of love grows stronger,

The delicate voice, more urgent with despair,

Custom and fear constraining her no longer,

Drives her at last on the waste leagues of air.

A vanishing speck in those inane dominions,

Single and frail, uncertain of her place.

Alone in the bright host of her companions,

Lost in the blue unfriendliness of space.

She feels it close now, the appointed season:

The invisible thread is broken as she flies;

Suddenly, without warning, without reason,

The guiding spark of instinct winks and dies.

Try as she will the trackless world delivers

No way, the wilderness of light no sign,

The immense and complex map of hills and rivers

Mocks her small wisdom with its vast design.

And darkness rises from the eastern valleys,

And the winds buffet her with their hungry breath,

And the great earth, with neither grief not malice,

Receives the tiny burden of her death.

-- A. D. Hope

A simple poem, but one that has always impressed me for the quiet way it

builds up in force and slowly expands to show her smallness against the

immensity of what she sets out to do.

peacesojourner