Early News and The Oven Bird

This is the third in a continuing series of bird-related poem postings (in honor of National Poetry Month). I think this poem captures the chaotic eruption of bird song characteristic of spring mornings during the peak of migration.

1203. Early News By Anna M. Pratt

THE SPARROW told it to the robin,
The robin told it to the wren,
Who passed it on, with sweet remark,
To thrush, and bobolink, and lark,
The news that dawn had come again.

Since Early News is relatively short, I am posting a second poem that I had posted once before.

Robert Frost (1874–1963). Mountain Interval. 1920.

9. The Oven Bird

THERE is a singer everyone has heard,
Loud, a mid-summer and a mid-wood bird,
Who makes the solid tree trunks sound again.
He says that leaves are old and that for flowers
Mid-summer is to spring as one to ten.
He says the early petal-fall is past
When pear and cherry bloom went down in showers
On sunny days a moment overcast;
And comes that other fall we name the fall.
He says the highway dust is over all.
The bird would cease and be as other birds
But that he knows in singing not to sing.
The question that he frames in all but words
Is what to make of a diminished thing.