Observations placeholder
Tranströmer, Tomas - The Cuckoo
Identifier
025719
Type of Spiritual Experience
Background
A description of the experience
The Cuckoo
A cuckoo sat cooing in a birch just north of the house. The sound was so powerful that I first thought it was an opera singer performing a cuckoo imitation.
Surprised I saw a bird. Its tailfeathers moved up and down with every note, like a pump handle at a well.
The bird hopped on both feet, then turned its body around and cried out to all four directions. Then it rose and flew muttering something over the house and flew a long way into the west. . . .
The summer grows old and everything collapses into a single melancholy sigh. Cuculus canoras returns to the tropics. Its time in Sweden is over. It won't be long!
As a matter of fact the cuckoo is a citizen of Zaire. I am not so much in love with travel any longer.
But the journey visits me.
In these days when I am pushed farther and farther into a corner, when the tree rings widen, when I
need reading glasses. Many more things happen than we can carry.
There is nothing to be astonished about. These thoughts carry me just as loyally as Susi and Chuma carried Livingston's mummified body all the way through Africa.