The Nightingale

Like a loud flight of birds, dark complexity,

All my memories beating down on me,

Beating down through the yellow foliage

Of my heart’s bent alder-trunk, its gaze

Silvered violet in the lake of Regret,

Whose melancholy is still flowing yet,

Beat down, and then the evil murmur

That a moist rising breeze quells there,

Dies away by degrees in the leaves, so

In an instant you will hear no more, oh,

No more than a voice extolling the Absent,

No more than the voice – oh, languishment! –

Of the bird, my First Love, that still sings

As it did long ago on those first evenings;

And below the sad splendour of the moon

Rising in pale solemnity, a June

Night, melancholy, heavy with summer,

Full of silence and darkness, in the azure

That a gentle wind brushes, rocks asleep

The tree that trembles, the nightingale that weeps.

-o0o-