Black Birds

WHAT urge of impetuous flight
Has driven the blackbirds this late August day,
The sunlight bright on sleek red-shouldered wing,
From the lush marshes of their harboring,
From a world of shadowed water and bending reeds,
Low nests and swart close weeds,
To these green arching trees in brief delay,
In urgent circling crowds swerving and calling?
Prescience of autumn, though no leaf is falling?
Sense of the weakening sun, though his rays burn bright?

Harsh through the thick-leaved elm trees hot with summer
Their jargon strikes like shiverings of split glass,
Sharp-pitched alike for the venturesome, the latecomer;
Their black forms dot the trees, — the sun glances
On sleek wings veering, seeking still to alight, —
Till, on a sudden impulse, a quick stir
Moves them; with swelling whirr
In a cloud they rise and pass,
Wheeling to harmony of sound and sight,
Merging the clamor of their dissonances
Southward, unerringly southward in strong flight.

Almost we may see in the green yet paling meadows
The crimsoning sumach and the goldenrod,
Brown seed, full-feathered pod,
Or the thin grass lying in sun-struck windows,
And a sense nostalgic, a sense of sadness fills
The silence the birds have left, as of overcast
Fair skies, and of summer past,
With the gullies clean again, and the long hills
Stripped to their rock-lean lines, their scrub bare,
And a crisp stillness as of frosty air.