Granddad - Thinking of you today, and how I used to write letters whilst in Australia, and never quite know what to say or how to get through the distance between us. This was one of my favourite poems then, as now. I found some fundamental comfort in it, which I think is a feeling I may have got from you - the comfort and reassurance of being just a tiny speck in the natural order of things, which accepts all, a life, an anxiously beating heart, a death. *** From "The Death of a Bird", A. D. Hope (1907-2000) She feels it close now, the appointed season: The invisible thread is broken as she flies; Suddenly, without warning, without reason, The guiding spark of instinct winks and dies. Try as she will the trackless world delivers No way, the wilderness of light no sign, The immense and complex map of hills and rivers Mocks her small wisdom with its vast design. And darkness rises from the eastern valleys, And the winds buffet her with their hungry breath, And the great earth, with neither grief nor malice, Receives the tiny burden of her death.