You who loved twilight and the dusky night
Must perch transfixed, undazzled, in this room
Of smoke and fume and talk and garish light:
A rigid mummy in a glassy tomb,
Tawdry with paint and artificial grass,
With sand and moss, and boughs of cork and glue,
Until some spring a careless servant lass
Shatter your case and make an end of you;
Or moth within your case finding its way
Shall breed new life to work your last decay.
You knew this countryside; your still wings were
Part of its glamour forty years ago,
As in the twilight you came sweeping there
Round stack, and ivied barn, and old hedgerow
From Stubbins Wood you’d beat to Assarts Farm
And then by Flixter Beck to Nickerbush
Until one eve the cool sweet curfew calm
Was broken by a gun, and with a tumbling rush
To earth you came; wings whirling o’er and o’er,
And life’s mysterious light informed your eyes no more.
Your race is reckoned wise and mine more so;
But ne’er a seer of us can cast a spell,
To shield our memories safe from overthrow,
That’s one whit better than your fragile shell.
And gallant bipeds, many and many a one,
Who made much stir and flutter in their day,
From their familiar hunting fields have gone,
And not one relic of their flight does stay:
Old gunning Time has ta’en them altogether,
Nor left of their brave plumage one poor feather.
(Kenneth Herbert Ashley)
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