Spring’s joyous choir of birds
(Dedicated to Staffan Söderblom)
Ah those joyous voices of birds in spring!
How well I too remember the choir
of those small wingèd singers
They were borne in on a special tray
by schoolmaster Gustav Edin,
extremely dusty, increasingly pale in colour
and – it might possibly seem –
somewhat overambitiously
stuffed:
sparrow and nightingale, hawk and pied fly-catcher,
meadow pipit and dipper –
And from a gramophone record
from Radio Sweden, much over-used,
all their joyous voices were played
I never learnt
to distinguish one chirp from the other
And now in October the dull voice
of the curlew is all that is left
I did however
finally learn that one
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