The Birds

 Each night, he beds down in the fecund earth

while at the shore she tends her empty nest.

He sees she does not know what she is worth

and so puffs out his tiny crimson chest

to sing to her his plaintive little songs

(unmusical and often wrongly stressed)

for while he knows he’s just where he belongs,

by night he thinks of her and dares to dream

of how one day he’ll swim out with the swans

to join her in the middle of the stream

and for a moment he could take his share

of grace and, gracefully, they’d float downstream

and in that moment, love would trump despair

and, once they’d celebrated this rebirth,

they’d beat their wings and vanish into air.