Bird-Watching

The poet as a bird-watcher and bird-watching as poetry, This is the thing that I want to delve deep and dwell upon As poetry will cease to remain poetry If the birds go depleting And greenery of the wilds And blueness of the sunny hills. Without bird-watching, one cannot be a poet And the bird-watcher is a poet, Try to watch at least for to be poet, See them with a poetical heart For to be a painter of life and the world around, Animate or inanimate. The scarecrow lying it falsely atop the building As no flesh-eating birds alights upon, As their numbers have fallen miserably And we see them not, Rarely come to mark and sight them, The vulture, the hawk and the kite. Sitting in the armchair, you cannot view it all, The things of the landscapes, The panorama of the wild, The studio with the painted scenery cannot Give the natural scenery, Just can belie them. The hawk targetting from up above, The kite circling over the object of its prey to swoop down, The vulture meditating to dwell upon, Collecting the news for the whereabouts Of the veterinary dead and the municipal garbage heaps, Contacting sweepers the scavenger birds. Into the fields, labouring on a carcass like a taxidermist, Away from the town, At some lonely place, Into the deeps and downs, The vulture feeding upon Or sitting atop the abattoir tin roofs. The blue birds flapping the wings with the flutter and dive, The dark black crows crowing at dawnbreak to tell Of the arrival of some new and strange guest, The cranes, storks and herons at work Like some Indian fishermen for all daylong, The golden orioles yellow and stripes strangely. Now-a-days the sparrows chirp they not from the rooftops, Nor flutter and whir from The straw-sheds and thatches, The cottages turned into villas, Cemented cottages and villas And the birds flown away, Where, ask you not? The moping owls see I sometimes, wheatish, whitish and blackly, Passing the night-time, Grotesque-looking, bizarre-bizarre and weird, The shortish beak, The eyes big-big and bulging, Ogling beautifully, How to ask, Who are you, what to say? The black bats see I readying for their flights Marking radars and signals, measuring wave-lengths, Just like the circus artistes at the nets, The acrobats, The Indian jugglers walking tip-toe In between the makeshift poles Fastening the rope. The sterlings grizzled and striped settling down In pairs and couples, Fluttering and flying away, Picking fallen grains and cereals, Coming together, flying together with, I can just see Without talking to them.