To celebrate National Poetry Month, The Poetry Box is sharing a Poem-of-the-Day, selected from various anthologies and individual poet collections that we have published over the years.
Please enjoy today’s selection: “The Sorrowing of Birds” by Jane Yolen, which appears in Poeming Pigeons – Poems about Birds:
The Sorrowing of Birds
When I think of you,
I hear birds soaring,
sorrowing above the trees,
their songs, perfect phrases of grief,
where once I heard joy.
The tapping of woodpeckers
I decode into elegies,
The peeping of hatchlings
under the bathroom window
are constant spring reminders
of my loss.
How can I let it go entire,
when the birds are my memory,
when every morning they sing
an oratorio to their old friend.
There is finality in obituary,
but not true closure,
even eight years along.
Bird song and its soaring sorrow
sustains me even
while it makes me linger
longer in the past.
I need no recordings of birdsong
to remind me,
just the open window
and the dawn.
