That April bird is back,
the one that cries: Right here, right here!
Right, right, right, right, right!
Not much melody,
but lots of self-confidence.
Maybe it’s a pathetic fallacy,
but then how often does nature speak
straight into our writing
with Zen advice?
And every time I hear this bird,
who seems to vanish after April
(or maybe merely changes passwords
to something I can’t recognize?),
it flashes me back to earlier Aprils
when I caught the sound of its call—
no, not just sound, but meaning!—
as I cleared up fallen twigs
or sipped morning tea on the porch.
The bird is back again—whereas I,
I never left:
I’m still right here, right?
Sibelan Forrester is a Professor of Russian in the Department of Modern Languages and Literatures at Swarthmore College. She is a translator, a poet and a member of the Mad Poets Society.