PASTORAL AS COMPLAINT
by Bruce Weigl
The robin is so quarrelsome. He barks to no one in the trees;
he fluffs his body twice its size and rattles in the leaves.
He doesn’t know or won’t accept the nest is empty now,
the eggs a tatter on the ground. The storm was quick,
we didn’t see it come; no sound above the hum
a summer morning makes when god is in his place
and we are free of tragedies that pile up along the way.
The robin is so quarrelsome;
he thinks his life is gone just like the nest,
but he’s like the rest of us, it’s only just begun.
Photo: colonial1637(off & on)’s, ALL RIGHTS RESERVED
ABOUT THE AUTHOR: Bruce Weigl served in Vietnam in 1967 and 1968 and was awarded a Bronze Star. His first full-length collection of poems was published in 1979. He has received two Pushcart Prizes, a Patterson Poetry Prize, and a Yaddo Foundation Fellowship. Weigl was awarded the Bread Loaf Fellowship in Poetry in 1981 and a grant from the National Endowment for the Arts in 1988. He was also nominated for the Pulitzer Prize in 1988 for Song of Napalm.
Silver Birch Press 