An Epilogue To A Prologue Poem by Valsa George

An Epilogue To A Prologue

Rating: 5.0


A nest of intricate design
A piece of art unmatched in decor
Amid the verdurous darkness
Of needle like leaves
The gay habitat of a swallow and her brood.

How suddenly it erupts into a clatter of sounds,
As the mother bird comes diving in
With a wee bit of a wriggling worm
Discreetly borne in her tiny beak.

Thrusting it into the gaping mouths
She departs and comes again
And again comes with something
A whirring insect or a twisting thing.
Nothing can appease her ravenous horde
And on she goes ferreting about.

At night fall she alights abrupt
From what infinite heights, God alone knows
Darting into her nest as she hovers,
The din subsides............
First into a fizzle, then into sharp silence

Bundled in her warmth, the little ones
Sleep till the first flutter of dawn
From my window, I enjoy this diurnal scene
Repeating itself in methodical precision
Until someday, into heaven's insurmountable heights
The young ones take off on tiny wings!

A sight so accustomed, cheery and gleeful
My eyes would soon be deprived of
And the thought makes me ill at ease
A wonder it is, the young ones
Inexperienced though, thrives so well
On catapulted suddenly into an eerie world!

What husbandry in nature!
What Godly solicitude!

The next morn, my heart missed a beat
At what I espied through my open window.
On the ground lay the swallow's nest
Ripped, broken and blown to pieces
Like a heap of rubble after a tremor.
By its side lay, a few downy feathers
The sad reminder of a stark felony!

In an instant flashed past
The grim image of the black Tom cat
That prowls my courtyard in the dark
With glowing eyes and bristly whiskers

Damning that accursed thing
I picked up that wreckage
My mind violently mutinying over
The ‘insolent might'! ! !

COMMENTS OF THE POEM

These little joys make one`s heart feel a sense of fullness and the rest is a phase of bliss mysterious. The power of writing scales to the peak of a splendid reverie that Charles Lamb would envy..

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Danny Draper 24 September 2012

Such grace and beauty skillfully told of selfless nurturing, then torn asunder and deleted, retribution but a poets loss and scorn, an indignation to that malevolent feline stealth. Fine write of natures struggles and out observations of its amenity and fury.

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Anita Sehgal 04 October 2012

nature is beautiful and cruel at the same time. This duality of nature is so well depicted!

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Om Chawla 05 September 2013

An excellent poem indeed. The cruelty of nature does leave one depressed.

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Susan Williams 26 August 2016

Thank you for sharing this, Valsa. The hectic life of bird parents is awe-inspiring, is it not? Ohhhhhhhhhhh, cats! I love cats- -in their homes, not my yard. For many many years we had quail families living in our bushes and single-filing across our driveway. and taking dust baths under our flaming bush.. they were such fun year after year.. then the neighborhood became infested with cats running loose. In two years all the quail families were gone- -dead or fled. It hurts to see the emptiness- it would be one thing if the cats were starving and had to hunt to survive... Very poignant write. 10

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Ovi Odiete 28 September 2015

painful and heart rending. i loved this poem.

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Madathil Rajendran Nair 19 September 2015

A heart-rending poem indeed, Valsa-ji. Thanks for inviting me to read this. You have captured the bird's movements wonderfully well. The poignancy of the tragedy is well brought out at the end. (10)

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Akhtar Jawad 05 March 2015

It's an impressive and heart touching story of the mother birds. I see it in my nest and I see it in so many nests. What can we do, we are helpless.

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Deepak Kumar Pattanayak 21 August 2014

Very touching indeed and this delicately woven piece has all the pathos of humanity........Valsa......we are all puppets in the hands of Nature........we are just mute spectators to her doing and undoing.......we react taking them into our heart......in return we moisten our eyes into tears out of sorrow or joy.......great write....

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