Out walking in the frozen swamp one grey day,
I paused and said, ‘I will turn back from here.
No, I will go on farther--and we shall see.’
The hard snow held me, save where now and then
One foot went through. The view was all in lines
Straight up and down of tall slim trees
Too much alike to mark or name a place by
So as to say for certain I was here
Or somewhere else: I was just far from home.
A small bird flew before me. He was careful
To put a tree between us when he lighted,
And say no word to tell me who he was
Who was so foolish as to think what he thought.
He thought that I was after him for a feather--
The white one in his tail; like one who takes
Everything said as personal to himself.
Now close the windows and hush all the fields;
If the trees must, let them silently toss;
No bird is singing now, and if there is,
Be it my loss.
It will be long ere the marshes resume,
It will be long ere the earliest bird:
So close the windows and not hear the wind,
But see all wind-stirred.
I have wished a bird would fly away,
And not sing by my house all day;
Have clapped my hands at him from the door
When it seemed as if I could bear no more.
The fault must partly have been in me.
The bird was not to blame for his key.
And of course there must be something wrong
In wanting to silence any song.
When the spent sun throws up its rays on cloud
And goes down burning into the gulf below,
No voice in nature is heard to cry aloud
At what has happened. Birds, at least, must know
It is the change to darkness in the sky.
Murmuring something quiet in her breast,
One bird begins to close a faded eye;
Or overtaken too far from his nest,
Hurrying low above the grove, some waif
Swoops just in time to his remembered tree.
At most he thinks or twitters softly, ‘Safe!
Now let the night be dark for all of me.
Let the night be too dark for me to see
Into the future. Let what will be, be.’
The house had gone to bring again
To the midnight sky a sunset glow.
Now the chimney was all of the house that stood,
Like a pistil after the petals go.
The barn opposed across the way,
That would have joined the house in flame
Had it been the will of the wind, was left
To bear forsaken the place’s name.
No more it opened with all one end
For teams that came by the stony road
To drum on the floor with scurrying hoofs
And brush the mow with the summer load.
The birds that came to it through the air
At broken windows flew out and in,
Their murmur more like the sigh we sigh
From too much dwelling on what has been.
The sound of the closing outside door was all.
You made no sound in the grass with your footfall,
As far as you went from the door, which was not far;
But you had awakened under the morning star
The first song-bird that awakened all the rest.
He could have slept but a moment more at best.
Already determined dawn began to lay
In place across a cloud the slender ray
For prying beneath and forcing the lids of sight,
And loosing the pent-up music of over-night.
But dawn was not to begin their ‘pearly-pearly’
(By which they mean the rain is pearls so early,
Before it changes to diamonds in the sun),
Neither was song that day to be self-begun.
You had begun it, and if there needed proof--
The west was getting out of gold,
The breath of air had died of cold,
When shoeing home across the white,
I thought I saw a bird alight.
In summer when I passed the place
I had to stop and lift my face;
A bird with an angelic gift
Was singing in it sweet and swift.
No bird was singing in it now.
A single leaf was on a bough,
And that was all there was to see
In going twice around the tree.
From my advantage on a hill
I judged that such a crystal chill
Was only adding frost to snow
As gilt to gold that wouldn’t show.
The sky was touched with tints of morn,
A wind was in the trees,
I lay in bed awakened
By the murmur of the leaves.
I listened to the chirping
Of the first-awakened bird,
And, his leather heels a-clicking,
Some lad off to work I heard.
Then my thoughts to sleep returning
Wondered briefly, of us three,
What brave paths the fates have destined
For the bird, the lad and me.
All day I'd been tracking along the Monon in search
of some sign of spring, but only once had come across
Kentucky blue grass curling up a dormant poplar's trunk
and small purple flowers dotting a crushed lawn.
Then,
this one prize.
A cardinal, a preacher!
& then a little cold rain fell.
I was a small child
when a bird flew into our house —
I caught it.
It was tweeting and tweeting
trying to flee.
‘Free it’, my grandfather said.
‘No’, I replied, ‘it is singing.
Let’s keep it in a cage’.
‘It is crying’, he said.
‘Birds sing only in the forest;
in the cage, they just cry.’
He opened the window.
I let the bird go.
there is a huge gray bird out on the roof
he wants to eat my heart out
the daisies are asleep no-one knows.
I chased a galloping lamb up the road remember the day
it got away and galloped up the road and was gone ?
there is a huge gray bird on the roof outside
he wants to eat out my heart
the daisies are asleep and no-one knows.
I chased a galloping lamb up the road remember the day
it escaped the butcher’s van and galloped up the road.
the ragged bird panics dead flies from the window nets
it claws the glass
it is tearing at petrified flies for its meat
it is caught in their weaving.