The Oven Bird

(Oven bird: Seiurus aurocapilla)

Listen to: 

The Oven Bird (:58)

by Robert Frost 

performed by Bob Gonzalez, rhapsode

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.