Today's Earth Prayer

[willowoak]

It is neither spring nor summer: it is Always,

With towhees, finches, chickadees, California

        quail, wood doves,

With wrens, sparrows, juncos, cedar waxwings,

        flickers,

With Baltimore orioles, Michigan bobolinks,

And those birds forever dead,

The passenger pigeon, the great auk, the

        California paraquet,

All birds remembered, O never forgotten!

All in my yard, of a perpetual Sunday,

All morning! All morning!

 

–       Theodore Roethke