Greenshank

Greenshank

His single note -- one can't help calling it
piping, one can't help
calling it plaintive -- slides droopingly down
no more than a semitone, but is filled
with an octave of loneliness, with the whole sad scale
of desolation.

He won't leave us. He keeps flying
fifty yards and perching
on a rock or a small hummock,
drawing attention to himself.
Then he calls and calls
and flies on again
in a flight
roundshouldered but dashing,
skulking yet bold.

Cuckoo, phoenix, nightingale,
you are no truer emblems
than this bird is.
He is the melancholy that flies
in the weathers of my mind,
He is the loneliness that calls to me there
in a semitone
of desolate octaves.

-- Norman MacCaig

(From "THE POETRY OF BIRDS" Ed. -- Simon Armitage and Tim Dee)

{Enlightening -- how the poet (evidently a birder in his own right) doesn't use "Common" in the title and how he uses "He" (instead of "he") in the third stanza. Almost as if the poem addresses someone divine.}