Swifts

Swifts

by Anne Stevenson

Spring comes little, a little. All April it rains.

The new leaves stick in their fists; new ferns still fiddleheads.

But one day the swifts are back. Face to the sun like a child

You shout, 'The swifts are back!'

Sure enough, bolt nocks bow to carry one sky-scyther

Two hundred miles an hour across fullblown windfields.

Swereee swereee. Another. And another.

It's the cut air falling in shrieks on our chimneys and roofs.

The next day, a fleet of high crosses cruises in ether.

These are the air pilgrims, pilots of air rivers.

But a shift of wing, and they're earth-skimmers, daggers

Skilful in guiding the throw of themselves away from themselves.

Quick flutter, a scimitar upsweep, out of danger of touch, for

Earth is forbidden to them, water's forbidden to them,

All air and fire, little owlish ascetics, they outfly storms,

They rush to the pillars of altitude, the thermal fountains.

Here is a legend of swifts, a parable —

When the Great Raven bent over earth to create the birds,

The swifts were ungrateful. They were small muddy things

Like shoes, with long legs and short wings,

So they took themselves off to the mountains to sulk.

And they stayed there. 'Well,' said the Raven, after years of this,

'I will give you the sky. You can have the whole sky

On condition that you give up rest.'

'Yes, yes,' screamed the swifts, 'We abhor rest.

We detest the filth of growth, the sweat of sleep,

Soft nests in the wet fields, slimehold of worms.

Let us be free, be air!'

So the Raven took their legs and bound them into their bodies.

He bent their wings like boomerangs, honed them like knives.

He streamlined their feathers and stripped them of velvet.

Then he released them, Never to Return

Inscribed on their feet and wings. And so

We have swifts, though in reality, not parables but

Bolts in the world's need: swift

Swifts, not in punishment, not in ecstasy, simply

Sleepers over oceans in the mill of the world's breathing.

The grace to say they live in another firmament.

A way to say the miracle will not occur,

And watch the miracle.

Earth Day

Earth Day

by Jane Yolen

I am the Earth

And the Earth is me.

Each blade of grass,

Each honey tree,

Each bit of mud,

And stick and stone

Is blood and muscle,

Skin and bone.

And just as I

Need every bit

Of me to make

My body fit,

So Earth needs

Grass and stone and tree

And things that grow here

Naturally.

That's why we

Celebrate this day.

That's why across

The world we say:

As long as life,

As dear, as free,

I am the Earth

And the Earth is me. 

Sonnet XCVIII: From you have I been absent in the spring

Sonnet XCVIII: From you have I been absent in the spring

by William Shakespeare

From you have I been absent in the spring,

When proud-pied April, dressed in all his trim,

Hath put a spirit of youth in everything,

That heavy Saturn laughed and leaped with him.

Yet nor the lays of birds, nor the sweet smell

Of different flowers in odour and in hue,

Could make me any summer’s story tell,

Or from their proud lap pluck them where they grew:

Nor did I wonder at the lily’s white,

Nor praise the deep vermilion in the rose;

They were but sweet, but figures of delight

Drawn after you, – you pattern of all those.

    Yet seem’d it winter still, and, you away,

    As with your shadow I with these did play.

water island

Water Island

by Howard Moss

Finally, from your house, there is no view;

The bay's blind mirror shattered over you

And Patchogue took your body like a log

The wind rolled up to shore. The senseless drowned

Have faces nobody would care to see,

But water loves those gradual erasures

Of flesh and shoreline, greenery and glass,

And you belonged to water, it to you,

Having built, on a hillock, above the bay,

Your house, the bay giving you reason to,

Where now, if seasons still are running straight,

The horsehose crabs clank armor night and day,

Their couplings far more ancient than they eyes

That watched them from your porch. I saw one once

Whose back was a history of how we live;

Grown onto every inch of plate, except

Where the hinges let it move, were living things,

Barnacles, mussels, water weeds—and one

Blue bit of polished glass, glued there by time:

The origins of art. It carried them

With pride, it seemed, as if endurance only

Matters in the end. Or so I thought.

Skimming traffic lights, starboard and port,

Steer through planted poles that mark the way,

And other lights, across the bay, faint stars

Lining the border of Long Island's shore,

Come on at night, they still come on at night,

Though who can see them now I do not know.

Wild roses, at your back porch, break their blood,

And bud to test surprises of sea air,

And the birds fly over, gliding down to feed

At the two feeding stations you set out with seed,

Or splash themselves in a big bowl of rain

You used to fill with water. Going across

That night, too fast, too dark, no one will know,

Maybe you heard, the last you'll ever hear,

The cry of the savage and endemic gull

Which shakes the blood and always brings to mind

The thought that death, the scavenger, is blind,

Blunders and is stupid, and the end

Comes with ironies so fine the seed

Falters in the marsh and the heron stops

Hunting in the weeds below your landing stairs,

Standing in a stillness that now is yours.

Trees

Trees

by Joyce Kilmer

I think that I shall never see

A poem lovely as a tree.

A tree whose hungry mouth is prest

Against the earth's sweet flowing breast;

A tree that looks at God all day,

And lifts her leafy arms to pray;

A tree that may in Summer wear

A nest of robins in her hair;

Upon whose bosom snow has lain;

Who intimately lives with rain.

Poems are made by fools like me,

But only God can make a tree.

rain

Rain

by Kazim Ali

With thick strokes of ink the sky fills with rain.

Pretending to run for cover but secretly praying for more rain.

Over the echo of the water, I hear a voice saying my name.

No one in the city moves under the quick sightless rain.

The pages of my notebook soak, then curl. I've written:

"Yogis opened their mouths for hours to drink the rain."

The sky is a bowl of dark water, rinsing your face.

The window trembles; liquid glass could shatter into rain.

I am a dark bowl, waiting to be filled.

If I open my mouth now, I could drown in the rain.

I hurry home as though someone is there waiting for me.

The night collapses into your skin. I am the rain.

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