Bird's Lament

The little sparrows
hop ingenuously
about the pavement
quarreling
with sharp voices
over those things
that interest them.
But we who are wiser
shut ourselves in
on either hand
and no one knows
whether we think good
or evil.

Meanwhile,
the old man who goes about
gathering dog-lime
walks in the gutter
without looking up
and his tread
is more majestic than
that of the Episcopal minister
approaching the pulpit
of a Sunday.

These things
astonish me beyond words.

Bird. Bird with outstretched
wings poised
inviolate unreaching

yet reaching
you image this November

planes to a stop
miraculously fixed in my
arresting eyes

...

makes him
cry out lustily -
which is a trait
more related to music
than otherwise.
Wherever he finds himself
in early spring,
on back streets
or beside palaces,
he carries on
unaffectedly
his amours.
It begins in the egg,
his  genders it:
What is more pretentioulsy
useless
or about which
we more pride ourselves?

...

Ten thousand sparrows
who had come in from
the desert
to roost. They filled the trees
of a small park. Men fled
(with ears ringing!)
from their droppings,
leaving the premises
to the alligators
who inhabit
the fountain. His image
is familiar
as that of the aristocratic
unicorn

...

throws back his head
and simply -
yells! The din
is terrific
The way he swipes his bill
across a plank
to clean it,
is decisive.
So with everything
he does. His coppery
eybrows
give him the air
of being always
a winner-and yet
I saw once,
the female of his species
clinging determinedly
to the edge of
a water pipe,
catch him
by his crown-feathers
to hold him
silent,
subdued,
hanging above the city streets
until
she was through

...

the black escutcheon of the breast
undecipherable,
an effigy of a sparrow,
a dried wafer only,
left to say
and it says it
without offence,
beautifully;
This was I,
a sparrow.
I did my best;
farewell.

...

Against the sky.
Let me not forget at least,
after the three day rain,
beaks raised aface, the two starlings
at and near the top twig
of the white-oak, dwafing
the barn, completing the minute
gree of the sculptured foliage, their
bullet heads bent back, their horny
lips chattering to the morning
sun! Praise! while the
wraithlike warblers, all but unseen
in looping flight dart from
pine to spruce, spruce to pine
southward. Southward! where
new mating warms the wit and cold
does not strike, for respite.