Robin on a Sculpted Stone

This poem appears in the Spring 2019 issue of Modern Age. To subscribe now, go here.

Robin on a sculpted stone
                all alone,
Why are you a welcome guest,
                brightly dressed    
On this lawn of sorrow spread
                with the dead?
Isn’t your unseemly song
                clearly wrong?
Inappropriate the note
                from your throat —
Here, atop a marker left
                by bereft
Parents who, with sorrow weighed,
                lately laid
Their beloved child to rest?
                If your nest
Should be visited by death,
                would your breath
Come less lively from your throat?
                Would it float
In the proper minor key
                melody,
Fitting to accompany
                tragedy?

Yet your song is welcome here,
                and your cheer
Comforting, because you chant
                ignorant
Of the doom that spring denies.
                Harmonize,
For us, human misery’s
                elegies
With the music you’ve conveyed
                in the shade
Of this weeping-willow air.
                Sing the prayer
We cannot express in words.
                Happy birds,
Chant your peaceful serenade
                when we’re laid
Here for you to sing to us
                and we too
                are, like you,
Blessedly oblivious.

Founded in 1957 by the great Russell Kirk, Modern Age is the forum for stimulating debate and discussion of the most important ideas of concern to conservatives of all stripes. It plays a vital role in these contentious, confusing times by applying timeless principles to the specific conditions and crises of our age—to what Kirk, in the inaugural issue, called “the great moral and social and political and economic and literary questions of the hour.”