Tree Sparrows by Mary Oliver

 Tree Sparrows

I thought I heard them

in some vines

swinging down

in a yard

across the road

so I went

this afternoon

across the white-sheeted fields,

slowly,

and listening hard,

until I found them

beside a creek

that was rattling 

icily along--

they were foraging

the frozen buckberreis

and calling out to each other

in delicate

wafers of sound.

The last time

I saw them

it was half the country away--

almost,

you might say,

in another world--

anyway, at a house

I no longer go to,

whose people

are all dead now,

whose graves, even,

I don't visit.

And the little birds

looked exactly the same!

Trim and bold,

and empty of any memory

that cold break the spell

of the moment,

they flew from branch to branch;

they sang

in the great, white cold.