A Bird Half Wakened In

The Land Was Ours Before We Were The Land's. She Was Our Land More Than A Hundred Years Before We Were Her People.

When The Spent Sun Throws Up Its Rays On Cloud And Goes Down Burning Into The Gulf Below, No Voice In Nature Is Heard To Cry Aloud At What Has Happened. Birds, At Least Must Know It Is The Change To Darkness In The Sky. Murmuring Something Quiet In Her Breast, One Bird Begins To Close A Faded Eye; Or Overtaken Too Far From His Nest, Hurrying Low Above The Grove, Some Waif Swoops Just In Time To His Remembered Tree. At Most He Thinks Or Twitters Softly, 'safe! Now Let The Night Be Dark For All Of Me. Let The Night Be Too Dark For Me To See Into The Future. Let What Will Be, Be.

Poetry Is When An Emotion Has Found Its Thought And The Thought Has Found Words.

Yes, And Even For The Past...that It Will Turn Out To Have Been All Right For What It Was. Something I Can Accept. Mistakes Made By The Self I Had To Be Or Was Not Able To Be.

The Poet, As Everyone Knows, Must Strike His Individual Note Sometime Between The Ages Of Fifteen And Twenty-five. He May Hold It A Long Time, Or A Short Time, But It Is Then That He Must Strike It Or Never. School And College Have Been Conducted With The Almost Express Purpose Of Keeping Him Busy With Something Else Till The Danger Of His Ever Creating Anything Is Past.