89 Birds poems

is that a bird? is he singing? or is it that my heart to meet you willing???

Exert thy voice, sweet harbinger of spring! This moment is thy time to sing, This moment I attend to praise, And set my numbers to they lays. Free as thine shall be my song; As they music, short, or long. Poets, wild as thee, were born, Pleasing best when unconfined, When to please is least designed, Soothing but their cares to rest; Cares do still their thoughts molest, And still th' unhappy poet's breast, Like thine, when best he sings, is placed against a thorn. She begins, Let all be still! Muse, they promise now fulfill! Sweet, oh! sweet, still sweeter yet Can thy words such accents fit, Canst thou syllables refine, Melt a sense that shall retain Still some spirit of the brain, Till with sounds like these it join. 'Twill not be! then change thy note; Let division shake thy throat. Hark! Division now she tries; Yet as far the Muse outflies. Cease then, prithee, cease thy tune; Trifler, wilt thou sing till *June*? Till thy business all lies waste, And the time of building's past! Thus we poets that have speech, Unlike what they forests teach, If a fluent vein be shown That's transcendant to our own, Criticize, reform, or preach, Or censure what we cannot reach.

The rolls and harrows lie at rest beside The battered road; and spreading far and wide Above the russet clods, the corn is seen Sprouting its spiry points of tender green, Where squats the hare, to terrors wide awake, Like some brown clod the harrows failed to break. Opening their golden caskets to the sun, The buttercups make schoolboys eager run, To see who shall be first to pluck the prize— Up from their hurry, see, the skylark flies, And o'er her half-formed nest, with happy wings Winnows the air, till in the cloud she sings, Then hangs a dust-spot in the sunny skies, And drops, and drops, till in her nest she lies, Which they unheeded passed—not dreaming then That birds which flew so high would drop agen To nests upon the ground, which anything May come at to destroy. Had they the wing Like such a bird, themselves would be too proud, And build on nothing but a passing cloud! As free from danger as the heavens are free From pain and toil, there would they build and be, And sail about the world to scenes unheard Of and unseen—Oh, were they but a bird! So think they, while they listen to its song, And smile and fancy and so pass along; While its low nest, moist with the dews of morn, Lies safely, with the leveret, in the corn.

Under warm New Mexico sun, we watched the pelican place himself down among the mallards as if he had been there all along, as if they were expecting the large, cumbersome body, the ungainliness. And he, sensing his own unsightly appearance, tucked his head close to his body and took on the smooth insouciance of a swan.

Geese are rude and loud and will chase you across a parking lot for no reason i respect them enormously

The hawk on the fence post didn't move for twenty minutes neither did i we had an understanding about stillness

The weaver bird built in our house And laid its eggs on our only tree. We did not want to send it away. We watched the building of the nest And supervised the egg-laying. And the weaver returned in the guise of the owner. Preaching salvation to us that owned the house. They say it came from the west Where the storms at sea had felled the gulls And the fishers dried their nets by lantern light. Its sermon is the divination of ourselves And our new horizon limits at its nest. But we cannot join the prayers and answers of the communicants. We look for new homes every day, For new altars we strive to rebuild The old shrines defiled by the weaver's excrement.

A comfort common to Southwest desert parking lots, a familiar, a messenger, an overlooked angel oiled by asphalt, consolation of the casino, supermarket spiritual guide picking at a free-today hot dog, a dropped grape or lentil, its purple-green head iridescent, its long keel of a tail. Black birds but not blackbirds with their showy epaulettes blood-red as a war field. Grackles glint like lacquered ebony, the females brunhildas, if by brunhilda you mean “brown-headed,” not the German “ready for battle.” Blind to centuries of borders, of battles, they waddle stiff-legged at your feet, a janitorial sweep to their tails, checking cart tires and light poles for moths, beetles, singing their seven songs — slides, whistles, wheezes, catcalls, chirps, murmurs, clucks — to console you for your losses: stolen cars, mortgage payments spun to mist at a roulette table, the beloved who breathed fire and scorched your wedding clothes.Folly,wreckage, they mutter, down among the packs of backerboard and spackle.We’ve fallen from Mayan temples. In a past life

The mourning dove wearing noon’s aureole coos from the rhododendron, oo-waoh, shadow o- ver what to do. Oh. And the sad rhetoric spreads through suburb and wood. Those who hear dove moan love no querulous warbling more— the going hence about which is there no- thing to do? From no small rip in fate the you you never shall be more will be extracted. Dove knows the rubric and starts in, who, who is next and soon?

Three lovely notes he whistled, too soft to be heard If others sang; but others never sang In the great beech-wood all that May and June. No one saw him: I alone could hear him Though many listened. Was it but four years Ago? or five? He never came again. Oftenest when I heard him I was alone, Nor could I ever make another hear. La-la-la! he called, seeming far-off— As if a cock crowed past the edge of the world, As if the bird or I were in a dream. Yet that he travelled through the trees and sometimes Neared me, was plain, though somehow distant still He sounded. All the proof is—I told men What I had heard. I never knew a voice, Man, beast, or bird, better than this. I told The naturalists; but neither had they heard Anything like the notes that did so haunt me, I had them clear by heart and have them still. Four years, or five, have made no difference. Then As now that La-la-la! was bodiless sweet: Sad more than joyful it was, if I must say That it was one or other, but if sad 'Twas sad only with joy too, too far off For me to taste it. But I cannot tell If truly never anything but fair The days were when he sang, as now they seem. This surely I know, that I who listened then, Happy sometimes, sometimes suffering A heavy body and a heavy heart, Now straightway, if I think of it, become Light as that bird wandering beyond my shore.