full of grace

HOUSE SPARROWS

for Joe and U. T. Summers

Not of the wealthy, Coral Gables class
Of traveler, nor that rarified tax bracket,
These birds weathered the brutal, wind-chill facts
Under our eaves,
nesting in withered grass,
Wormless but hopeful,
and now their voice enacts
Forsythian spring with primavernal racket.

Their color is the elderly, moleskin gray
Of doggedness, of mist, magnolia bark.
Salt of the earth, they are;
the common clay;
Meek emigres come over on the Ark
In steerage from the
Old Country of the Drowned
To settle down along Long Island Sound,

Flatbush, Weehawken,
our brownstone tenements,
Wherever the local idiom is Cheep.
Savers of string, meticulous and mild,
They are given to nervous flight,
the troubled sleep
Of those who remember terrible events,
The wide-eyed, anxious haste
of the exiled.

Like all the poor, their safety
lies in numbers
And hardihood and anonymity
In a world of dripping browns and
duns and umbers.
They have inherited the lower sky,
Their Lake of Constants,
their blue modality
That they are borne upon
and battered by.

Those little shin-bones,
hollow at the core,
Emaciate finger-joints,
those fleshless wrists,
Wrapped in a wrinkled, loose, rice-paper skin,
As though the harvests of earth had never been,
Where have we seen such
frailty before?
In pictures of Biafra and Auschwitz.

Yet here they are,
these chipper stratoliners,
Unsullen, unresentful,
full of the grace
Of cheerfulness,
who seem to greet all comers
With the wild confidence
of Forty-Niners,
And, to the lively honor of their race,
Rude canticles of "Summers, Summers, Summers."

Anthony Hecht

Copyright © Anthony Hecht

Copyright © 2009 Ploughshares

I, who fly with the swallows

DE AEGYPTO

I, even I, am he who knoweth the roads
Through the sky, and the wind thereof is my body.

I have beheld the Lady of Life,
I, even I, who fly with the swallows.

Green and gray is her rainment,
Trailing along the wind.

I, even I, aim he who knowth the roads
Through the sky, and the wind thereof is my body.

Manus animam pinxit,
My pen is in my hand

To write the acceptable word...
My mouth to chant the pure singing!

Who hath the mouth to receive it,
The song of the Lotus of Kumi?

I, even I, am he who knoweth the roads
Through the sky, and the wind thereof is my body.

I am flame that riseth in the sun,
I, even I, who fly with the swallows.

The moon is upon my forehead,
The winds are under my lips.

The moon is a great pearl in the waters of sapphire,
Cool to my fingers the flowing waters.

I, even I, am he who knoweth the roads
Through the sky, and the wind thereof is my body.

Ezra Pound