Birds to Mourn

Somewhere in the distant depths of time,
There is a place where a deep green sward
Covers the ground with a carpet of lime,
And where fern and flower both are lord.
Here there stands a grove deep and close,
Surrounded with a fence of climbing rose;

And here is a grove as deep and still
As space when the first star was born.
Slowly, over the green-swelled hill,
Ringing like the sound of a hunting horn,
Comes the song of the birds in that grove,
A song as sweet, as rich as love.

The grove is pine, both narrow and tall.
The trees are green as the glowing grass,
But darker, a jade-razored barky wall,
Which by silently the squirrels pass.
No one dares the depths of that grove,
Save the birds with a song as sweet as love.

But though sweet and rich, that song,
It is filled with the sound of mourning.
The melancholy in the birds seems wrong,
Given the beauty of the grove in the morning,
When the radiant rays come stabbing down,
And sunlight gives the grove a crown.

But it is not wrong when one takes note
Of the darkness of the grass and trees.
Then, the melancholy song in the throat
Of birds that would normally sing drowsy ease
Seems but proper; these birds mourn man,
And death of all things since the world began.

The song is a constant babble, a chorus.
The nightingale's unmatched voice is there,
And the bluebird's song of the dawn and forest,
Turned to matchless sadness in the air
That no matter how many days die to ember
Still the sweetness of sorrow will remember.

There the robin croons as if his season, spring,
Has failed him and faded back to gray.
There the crows, kaa-kaaing, take wing,
And with their voices sweep dust away
Of fallen melancholy, so on the morrow
The grove can resound with newer sorrow.

There the mute water birds gravely stalk,
And the swan sings sometimes as if dying.
There the hushed murmurs of sparrows talk,
Overawed by the sight of a phoenix flying.
All the birds in the universe are in the grove,
With their song of sorrow as old as love.

And that is the only way they can mourn:
For the keeping of sorrow to be true,
All the birds of the universe in voices forlorn
Would have to sing until time ends-as they do.
The birds are singing in that old grove,
Singing out the sorrow as sad as love.