Poetry Friday: Oven Bird

I'm working on a project for a museum in Tennessee, writing some information panels for them. This cute little ovenbird is in the tree exhibit. He gets his name from the shape of his nest, which looks like a dutch oven. His call is increasingly loud bursts of "teacher-TEAcher-TEACHER." So for Poetry Friday, my contribution is a Robert Frost poem about this little guy.

Photo by Bill Hilton Jr. from  Hilton Pond Center 

The Oven Bird

Robert Frost

There is a singer everyone has heard,

Loud, a mid-summer and a mid-wood bird,

Who makes the solid tree trunks sound again.

He says that leaves are old and that for flowers

Mid-summer is to spring as one to ten.

He says the early petal-fall is past

When pear and cherry bloom went down in showers

On sunny days a moment overcast;

And comes that other fall we name the fall.

He says the highway dust is over all.

The bird would cease and be as other birds

But that he knows in singing not to sing.

The question that he frames in all but words

Is what to make of a diminished thing.

More poetry Friday at Check it Out.