WHAT THE BIRDS SAID
by: John Greenleaf Whittier
(1807-1892)
- HE birds against the April wind
- Flew northward, singing as they flew;
- They sang, "The land we leave behind
- Has swords for corn-blades, blood for dew."
-
- "O wild-birds, flying from the South,
- What saw and heard ye, gazing down?"
- "We saw the mortar's upturned mouth,
- The sickened camp, the blazing town!
-
- "Beneath the bivouac's starry lamps,
- We saw your march-worn children die;
- In shrouds of moss, in cypress swamps,
- We saw your dead uncoffined lie.
-
- "We heard the starving prisoner's sighs
- And saw, from line and trench, your sons
- Follow our flight with home-sick eyes
- Beyond the battery's smoking guns."
-
- "And heard and saw ye only wrong
- And pain," I cried, "O wing-worn flocks?"
- "We heard," they sang, "the freedman's song,
- The crash of Slavery's broken locks!
-
- "We saw from new, uprising States
- The treason-nursing mischief spurned,
- As, crowding Freedom's ample gates,
- The long-estranged and lost returned.
-
- "O'er dusky faces, seamed and old,
- And hands horn-hard with unpaid toil,
- With hope in every rustling fold,
- We saw your star-dropt flag uncoil.
-
- "And struggling up through sounds accursed,
- A grateful murmur clomb the air;
- A whisper scarcely heard at first,
- It filled the listening heavens with prayer.
-
- "And sweet and far, as from a star,
- Replied a voice which shall not cease,
- Till, drowning all the noise of war,
- It sings the blessed song of peace!"
-
- So to me, in a doubtful day
- Of chill and slowly greening spring,
- Low stooping from the cloudy gray,
- The wild-birds sang or seemed to sing.
-
- They vanished in the misty air,
- The song went with them in their flight;
- But lo! they left the sunset fair,
- And in the evening there was light.
"What the Birds Said"
is reprinted from The Complete Poetical Works of John Greenleaf
Whittier. Ed. H.E.S. Boston: Houghton Mifflin, 1894. |
MORE POEMS BY JOHN GREENLEAF WHITTIER |
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