Overhead Poetry

Two Birds

A small bird crimson-hued

Among great realms of green

Fed on their multitudinous fruit—

But in his dark eye flamed more keen

A hunger as from joy to joy

He moved the poignance of his beak,

And ever in his heart he wailed,

"Where hangs the marvellous fruit I seek?"

Then suddenly above his head

A searching gaze of grief he turned:

Lo, there upon the topmost bough

A pride of golden plumage burned!

Lost in a dream no hunger broke,

This calm bird—aureoled, immense—

Sat motionless: all fruit he found

Within his own magnificence.

The watchful ravener below

Felt his time-tortured passion cease,

And flying upward knew himself

One with that bird of golden peace.

Sri Aurobindo's Comment

"It is very felicitous in expression, and taking. The fourth stanza is from the Intuitive, the rest not from the Higher Mind—for there a high-uplifted thought is the characteristic—but more probably from some realm of the inner Mind where thought and vision are involved in each other—that kind of fusion gives the easy felicity that is found here. All the same there is a touch of the Higher Mind perhaps in the 2nd lines of the second and the last stanza."

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