Birds

Birds

The young swifts in the chimney chatter

and I hear the sigh of the parents' wings;

the chimney is like a breathing heart in the bedroom wall.

Rain is coming,

a loon calls his shaken cry from the lake.

I should like to send you

words like this rain that is just starting to fall-

soft rain of a summer evening-

words to say I have not forgotten

the ladder over the lean-to

up to that flat roof in the spring nights,

how it used to be

under the mad, round moon

that made the mockingbird sing until dawn,

how I hung backward over the parapet,

dizzy, swooping, trusting;

my heart was like wings in my throat,

my body was a bird's.

Now I stand at the farmhouse window

watching the swallows dip low over the grass tops.

It is years since I saw you,

and still the wings whisper in the wall

and the soft rain softly repeats:

Yes, it was so, yes, yes it was so, it was so.



poem by Kate Barnes