I built a metal bird

When I first arrived here,
Came rumbling over the steppes
On iron rails pounded
Flat by roaring engines,
Breathing thick dark clouds out
Behind them for miles,
I thought it was the height,
The dizzying capacity of achievement.

Leaving a small damp town,
Lapped by the waves
Where the edge of our settled land
Gives way to the dark black borders
And powerful unseen currents of the sea,
I could never imagine anything like it:

The capital, splendid and terrifying;
Oiled and perfumed, and a kind of holy;
With a hundred churches and a hundred more
Houses, and stone taverns sour
With spilt beer and vomit.
Their doors decorated with melting snow on the lintel,
And letting out th

And what I came for:
The universities, filled with the old
And wise who counted each object adorning the sky,
And sagely told us their unnumberable number.
Men who stroked their beards
Which smelled of pipe smoke.
Tilting their glasses over their
Strawberry noses, they'd speak
Of history and steam, and ask:
What is to be done?


Only later I learned
That all the distance we had travelled so far
Was just enough to finally see where we are:
That we'd left our grandfathers' bones
Unburied in their native soil
And the breath we tried to blow back into them
Was just a hollow rattle.

Death in the streets; a man hit by a carriage;
A bomb going off in the square;
Will there be enough bread?
Sleeping each night in a small bare room,
Carrying my dreams with me
Across the border of sleep
Into this dingy world of explosions
And rumbling stomachs.

And it came to me:
We had to look out as well as in,
See each reflected in the other.
Our drama remaining meaningless
Without a theatre from which to see the stage.
And what, after all, is the highest platform we can find?
So I conceived a resolution to make something fly.

To build a metal bird, you first
Teach yourself to sing--
Learn the trills of the birds'
Secret tongue:
The rhythm of wingbeats
And the lyric of being carried aloft on currents.

Out in fields watching them swoop through the sky,
Turning in low circles over the vendors' stalls,
Hopping along the earth stalking earthworms,
I had to learn to ask my bird to come to life.

Each night I spent in my workshop,
Alone under the stars, my ears
Assaulated by the clanging fury of battered metal--
Awash in a flurry of thrown sparks--
The glow bleeding from my windows
Meekly reflecting the fire burning above,
Threaded between the clouds across the sky.

Impossible, you say. I thought so too,
Sometimes, at least.
But think on those three other dreams
Who became gripped by the thought of a star
And followed it to the end of its journey
To see the herald of their own world
Passing away.

Time passed and I am old now:
I stroke my long beard, and
Smell like damp wool; smoke a pipe
In the evenings. The bombs still go off,
But even their roar is too dim for my ears.
But it has not been an idle age I've passed.

I gave shape to a thought:
Found the words to say it
In the language in which the world
Does its speaking,
And it only remains now
For me to speak it aloud,
And see it written in fire across the sky.