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.