Such an active bird, probably the most lively i have come across that it is difficult to keep a track, Nuthatches though don’t seem to mind human presence as they are busy with their search along the tree that it is easy to get close and observe-occasionally it is startled by human presence and flies off. Nuthatches scamper on the branch sometimes upside down (in my earlier blog on Chestnut Bellied Nuthatch I had discussed about toe adaptation) in what seems like gravity defying feat. Purely arboreal bird it has a velvet black broad band on the forehead that streaks above the eye to the nape (missing in female, the above pic) and a striking coral red bill.
Harry Martinson: thinking out in the meadow
“So I went, and all that summer I tramped
round the country, heard the birds sing,
bathed in quiet streams and lakes and
roamed through glens and valleys where
the grass was dewy and clean. Clouds
drifted, winds moved in the woods,
flowers bowed and gleamed,
bumble-bees buzzed in the clover, girls
sang in the hay-fields.”
Harry Martinson (1904-1978) was a Swedish sailor, author and poet. It is a pleasant 
coincidence that his birth anniversary is falling day after, it is an honour since Martinson is someone I haven’t read before so an apt occasion to explore this Swedish poet. Harry Martinson didn’t have the best of the beginning; he was orphaned when he was very young and passed from one foster parent to another. In his semi-autobiographical Nasslorna blomma (The Nettles Flower) he writes about hardships encountered by a young boy in the countryside. The book begins with a short poem:
coincidence that his birth anniversary is falling day after, it is an honour since Martinson is someone I haven’t read before so an apt occasion to explore this Swedish poet. Harry Martinson didn’t have the best of the beginning; he was orphaned when he was very young and passed from one foster parent to another. In his semi-autobiographical Nasslorna blomma (The Nettles Flower) he writes about hardships encountered by a young boy in the countryside. The book begins with a short poem: I was small in the listening days.
At late harvests toothless mouths told
of leprous marsh-spot in the seed and
the bitter bloom of ergot on the rye.
I grew cold at my childhood hearth.
He joined a ship and found himself travelling to far off places including India and China –influence of eastern philosophy could be seen in his later work, it was during these periods that he developed closeness towards nature, he lived like a vagabond later shifted to poetry. These poems sought to free from early conventions, and because of his humble background he came to be part of a group that was referred to as working class modernist poet. Though a sceptic of man’s increasing reliance on technology he was remarkable in the fact that his competence extended beyond literature and philosophy to politics and science. What prescience these lines…
Now that man has gotten power enough
to bring about the trouble of the world
the time is now
to heal the trouble of the world in time
before all nature has become
everybody's troubled child.
Heavily influenced by events of the day –specifically Hiroshima- his masterpiece ‘Aniara’ is about people fleeing earth in spaceship to mars to be stranded in space (this blogger strongly believes that works of writers/poets after their demise is public property and therefore should be made accessible to everyone). The rejection of his critique on modernity by most people as also various other factors caused depression which was accentuated by the controversy regarding the Nobel prize that he was awarded in 1974 with fellow Swede, he suicided soon after.
The electrons
“With their round dance the electrons spin
chrysalises of that which abides,
the inmost cocoons
which do not open of their own accord
but are that which abides.
There it is not a matter of hatching out.
There it is a matter of tending and protecting
the metamorphoses of the inmost
deeper-down swaying,
the innermost playing of women in dance.”
From Li Kan speaks beneath the tree
Waves from all upheavals turn swiftly old
and paths from all upheavals soon become highroads.
What is left is a longing for something not
the wheel of appetites or revenges.
Man is best when he wishes good he cannot do
and stops breeding evil he finds easier to do.
He will still have a direction. It will have no end in view.
It is free from unsparing endeavor.
Li Ti's Advice
If you own two coppers, said Li-Ti on a journey,
buy one loaf of bread and one blossom.
The bread is there to fill you
The blossom you buy is to tell you
that life is worth the living.
Phantom Ships
We are the phantom ships, silently travelling
toward sun-ups and dawns.
We are the ships without homes, forever moving.
We sail silently in northern storms
and in temperate south sea swells -
we are the ships without homes, forever moving.
And the same wild dreams
always haunt our journey,
and the same songs reverberate always.
And forgotten storms wake up
to a deadly dance across the currents -
and an identical swell hums mildly and completely reconciling.
Look, a thousand ships have lost their course
and drifted off in the fog and a thousand
men have foundered while praying to the stars.
And we still see destinies just like them
heading toward the morning rays.
And the same dreams still fill
our tired brains.
But in the dark heavens of Orion,
just as twinkling, shines on tired men
who no longer pay attention to the visions of morning.
Tonight the rest of us still dream
about dawn's glittering light that will rise
over the wrecks on desolate dunes.
This poem the “Inner light” is something that has started to churn me for last few days
The inner light
In the inmost of the smallest of all spaces
runs a mute and constant play of color, inaccessible to eyes.
It is the light shut in that once in the moment of creation
was born inward and abode there, going on,
once it had broken up into the smallest of spectra
in keeping with prismatic law
at frequencies that by the sighted would be called colors
if they encountered eyes able to see.
It moved in periods
unimaginably small for time and space
but still with time and space enough for the least of the small.
In fact it found it had ample room and time.
It moved in cycles of nanoseconds and microspaces
from white light and the colors of the spectrum and back to white light.
A kind of breathing for light.
The photons breathed and pulsated with one another,
alternating signs and levels.
So the light kept going in spectral balance
from dense light to split
and back to dense light and split,
in spectral cycles infinitely repeated.
It was like a play of fans,
in keeping with the same law that holds for rainbows,
but with spread and folded fans
alternating with one another
in keeping with the law of light inscribed in them.
It was the light when it dances enclosed
when it is not traveling abroad and seen.
It belongs to the nature of light
that it can be shut in
and still not die out in its movement
that it preserves itself thus in the darkness
as thought, intent and aptitude,
that it remembers its changes
and performs its dance, its interplay.
With this art the light keeps together
the innumerable swarms of matter
and sings with light's spectral wings
the endless song in honor of the fullness of the world.
