A small dead bird

"I never saw a wild thing sorry for itself.
A small bird will drop frozen dead from a bough
without ever having felt sorry for itself."

D.H.Lawrence's poem 'Self Pity' seems fitting in its brevity as an epitaph for this diminutive corpse. It's a female chaffinch, or was, until it presumably flew into a window pane and dropped into the plant pot below.

A brief blip tonight too, the day having been almost completely given over the ongoing project of redecorating the kitchen, which of course means moving out all the stuff that I need to have at hand to do the most basic things like make a cup of tea, let alone cook a meal. There was little time left for blip hunting.

However, the death of a song bird can't help but bring to mind the singers lost in the past year. Earlier this month,when the parents of Amy Winehouse collected her 6th, and post-mortem, Grammy award in Los Angeles her father said
"Long live Whitney Houston, long live Amy Winehouse, Long live Etta James. There's a beautiful girl band up in heaven."

Since then another song bird has gone, Dory Previn. At least she had reached old age - I was amazed that she was 86. She was quite an icon of mine at one time and I even saw her perform live. She survived an abusive childhood, marital breakdown and periods of mental illness, all of which were documented in her Californian angsty songs. Here she is in one of her lighter moments, called Screaming. Wonderful lyrics. Thank you Dory.