HOMECOMING
Once only when the summer
was nearly over and my own
hair had been white as the day’s clouds
for more years than I was counting
I stood by the garden at evening
Paula was still weeding around
flowers that open after dark
and I looked up to the clear sky
and saw the new moon and at that
moment from behind me a band
of dark birds and then another
after it flying in silence
long curving wings hardly moving
the plovers just in from the sea
and the flight clear from Alaska
half their weight gone to get them home
but home now arriving without
a sound as it rose to meet them
— W.S. Merwin, from his book The Moon Before Morning (2014, Copper Canyon Press). Reprinted with permission of the publisher.
Photo by Dan Dzurisin used under Creative Commons license: Attribution-NonCommercial-NoDerivs 2.0 Generic
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What a striking poem, almost as if the poet is coming to himself in this long distanced magnificent bird, and to hear Merwin read it brings one closer again to the mysterious,