Acadian Flycatcher
He won't be singing anytime soon,
The Acadian flycatcher.
Don't listen for him in the glee club
Warbling at every garish dawn
And pleading encore! in the evening.
And he won't indulge in songs of sorrow
Sung in ciphered praise to Sorrow.
In the daylong gloom of the understory—
Clear of the Sun's net of enticing illusions—
He wanders the branches like a mendicant
In the sackcloth of his ashen garb,
His wide emotional eye
Dark and moist from all the pain in the world—
All the injustice, cruelty
And indifference—
From the mayfly and its greeting goodbye
To the savage snapping turtle
So hatefully frozen in Time—
To the pale tree cricket
That he himself is compelled
To swoop on and devour.
In the hush of the dappled murk
He emits the cry
Of a self-flagelant—
His defiance,
His protest,
His sharp rebuke
That is almost a curse.
No! I won't!
Yes! We can!
You will not! Stop and think!
Change your life!
His entire body of work
Is one bare bone of contention:
That the way it is
Is simply not acceptable.
**
But O—
In Virgil's Arcadia,
Upon Isaiah's Holy Mountain,
On the somnolent canvas of The Peaceable Kingdom—
He'd lift his song with full-throated ease!
The woods would ring with his praises
Until the very Creator would blush with pride!
He would shame into silence
The divine wood thrush,
The fabulous nightingale,
Even that gold-beaten canary
With the ruby heart
That choirs in the courts of Byzantium—
Because his birth was anything
But a sleep and a forgetting
Of the Arcadia from which he came.
**
I want to tell him—
My noble little friend!
You can't wait to be happy
Until everyone else is happy too!
But until prey and predator
Go the dusty way
Of Guelph and Ghibelline,
Until eyesight is fully restored
To the star-nosed mole
And each and every springtail
Only ever leaps for joy,
Until fireflies brand into the night
The categorical imperative
Of Immanuel Kant,
Until the stars—
No, he won't be singing anytime soon,
The Acadian flycatcher.