I just heard a loon-call on a TV ad and my body gave itself a quite voluntary shudder, as in the night in East Africa I heard the immense barking cough of a lion, so foreign and indifferent. But the lion drifts away and the loon stays close, calling, as she did in my childhood, in the cold rain a song that tells the world of men to keep its distance. It isn't the signal of another life or the reminder of anything except her call: still, at this quiet point past midnight the rain is the same rain that fell so long ago, and the loon says I'm seven years old again. @3At the far ends of the lake where no one lives or visits -- there are no roads to get there; you take the watercourse way, the quiet drip and drizzle of oars, slight squeak of oarlock, the bare feet can feel the cold water move beneath the old wood boat.@1 At one end the lordly great blue herons nest at the top of the white pine; at the other end the loons, just after daylight in cream-colored mist, drifting with wails that begin as querulous, rising then into the spheres in volume, with lost or doomed angels imprisoned within their breasts. | Discover our Poem Explanations and Poet Analyses!Other Poems of Interest...THE GLOVE AND THE LIONS by JAMES HENRY LEIGH HUNT A JEWISH FAMILY; IN A SMALL VALLEY OPPOSITE ST. GOAR by WILLIAM WORDSWORTH CHRISTMAS AFTER WAR by KATHARINE LEE BATES THE LAUGHING WOMAN by WILLIAM ROSE BENET RED RIVER EVENING by PAUL SOUTHWORTH BLISS THE BLACK FOREST ACOST by KATHRYN BLOOM UNTIL DEATH by ANNE CHARLOTTE LYNCH BOTTA THE WANDERER: 2. IN FRANCE: THE NOVEL by EDWARD ROBERT BULWER-LYTTON |