What I saw was just one eye <br />In the dawn as I was going : <br />A bird can carry all the sky <br />In that little button glowing. <br /> <br />Never in my life I went <br />So deep into the firmament. <br /> <br />He was standing on a tree, <br />All in blossom overflowing; <br />And he purposely looked hard at me, <br />At first, as if to question merrily : <br />' Where are you going ? ' <br />But next some far more serious thing to say : <br />I could not answer, could not look away. <br /> <br />Oh, that hard, round, and so distracting eye : <br />Little mirror of all the sky ! -- <br />And then the after-song another tree <br />Held, and sent radiating back on me. <br /> <br />If no man had invented human word, <br />And a bird-song had been <br />The only way to utter what we mean, <br />What would we men have heard, <br />What understood, what seen, <br />Between the trills and pauses, in between <br />The singing and the silence of a bird?<br /><br />Harold Monro<br /><br />http://www.poemhunter.com/poem/the-bird-at-dawn/
