Words found written on the back of a Barnes & Noble receipt for Samuel Taylor Coleridge: Selected Poems

Stephen Anderson, Bird of Paradise

I've heard it said——it might be true——that the old poets and storytellers have reached their final generations. What they do today will be forgotten, if it is known. Most of it will not be known, and will shortly never have existed.

If it must be so, it will be so. We'll do what we do and then we will die. No one can hope to accomplish much else. Ask the millennia, the dead empires and dark ages. Nobody does anything more.

However temporary, however doomed, there is still a joy in doing what you do, in being what you are. And there is still something wonderful in the lives of the remaining birds-of-paradise dancing their absurd dances for their last loves in the vanishing nowhere.