The birds against the April wind
Flew northward, singing as they flew;
They sang, “The land we leave behind
Has swords for corn-blades, blood for dew.”
“O wild-birds, flying from the South,
What saw and heard ye, gazing down?”
“We saw the mortar’ s upturned mouth,
The sickened camp, the blazing town!
“Beneath the bivouac’ s starry lamps,
We saw your march-worn children die;
In shrouds of moss, in cypress swamps,
We saw your dead uncoffined lie.
“We heard the starving prisoner’ s sighs
And saw, from line and trench, your sons
Follow our flight with home-sick eyes
Beyond the battery’ s smoking guns.”
“And heard and saw ye only wrong
And pain,” I cried, “O wing-worn flocks?”
“We heard,” they sang, “the freedman’ s song,
The crash of Slavery’ s broken locks!
“We saw from new, uprising States
The treason-nursing mischief spurned,
As, crowding Freedom’ s ample gates,
The long-estranged and lost returned.
“O’ er dusky faces, seamed and old,
And hands horn-hard with unpaid toil,
With hope in every rustling fold,
We saw your star-dropt flag uncoil.
“And struggling up through sounds accursed,
A grateful murmur clomb the air;
A whisper scarcely heard at first,
It filled the listening heavens with prayer.
“And sweet and far, as from a star,
Replied a voice which shall not cease,
Till, drowning all the noise of war,
It sings the blessed song of peace!”
So to me, in a doubtful day
Of chill and slowly greening spring,
Low stooping from the cloudy gray,
The wild-birds sang or seemed to sing.
They vanished in the misty air,
The song went with them in their flight;
But lo! they left the sunset fair,
And in the evening there was light.