Returning Birds -- A Nobelist's Poem

. RETURNING BIRDS

This spring the birds came back again too early.

Rejoice, O reason: instinct can err too.

It gathers wool, it dozes off--and down they fall

into the snow, into a foolish fate, a death

that doesn't suit their well-wrought throats and splendid claws,

their honest cartilage and conscientious webbing,

the heart's sensible sluice, the entrails'

maze,

the nave of ribs, the vertebrae in

stunning enfilades,

feathers deserving their own wing in

any crafts museum, the Benedictine

patience of the beak.

.

This is not a dirge--no, it's only

indignation.

An angel made of earthbound protein,

a living kite with glands straight from

the Song of Songs,

singular in air, without number in the

hand,

its tissues tied into a common knot

of place and time, as in an Aristotelian

drama

unfolding to the wings' applause,

falls down and lies beside a stone,

which in its own archaic,

simpleminded way

sees life as a chain of failed attempts.

.

--by Wislawa Szymborska

awarded the 1996

Nobel Prize for Literature.

From her collected poems, "View

With a Grain of Sand"