| THE BIRDS against the April wind | |
| Flew northward, singing as they flew; | |
| They sang, "The land we leave behind | |
| Has swords for corn-blades, blood for dew." | |
| |
| "O wild-birds, flying from the South, | 5 |
| What saw and heard ye, gazing down?" | |
| "We saw the mortar's upturned mouth, | |
| The sickened camp, the blazing town! | |
| |
| "Beneath the bivouac's starry lamps, | |
| We saw your march-worn children die; | 10 |
| In shrouds of moss, in cypress swamps, | |
| We saw your dead uncoffined lie. | |
| |
| "We heard the starving prisoner's sighs, | |
| And saw, from line and trench, your sons | |
| Follow our flight with home-sick eyes | 15 |
| Beyond the battery's smoking guns." | |
| |
| "And heard and saw ye only wrong | |
| And pain," I cried, "O wing-worn flocks?" | |
| "We heard," they sang, "the freedman's song, | |
| The crash of Slavery's broken locks! | 20 |
| |
| "We saw from new, uprising States | |
| The treason-nursing mischief spurned, | |
| As, crowding Freedom's ample gates, | |
| The long-estranged and lost returned. | |
| |
| "O'er dusky faces, seamed and old, | 25 |
| And hands horn-hard with unpaid toil, | |
| With hope in every rustling fold, | |
| We saw your star-dropt flag uncoil. | |
| |
| "And struggling up through sounds accursed, | |
| A grateful murmur clomb the air; | 30 |
| A whisper scarcely heard at first, | |
| It filled the listening heavens with prayer. | |
| |
| "And sweet and far, as from a star, | |
| Replied a voice which shall not cease, | |
| Till, drowning all the noise of war, | 35 |
| It sings the blessed song of peace!" | |
| |
| So to me, in a doubtful day | |
| Of chill and slowly greening spring, | |
| Low stooping from the cloudy gray, | |
| The wild-birds sang or seemed to sing. | 40 |
| |
| They vanished in the misty air, | |
| The song went with them in their flight; | |
| But lo! they left the sunset fair, | |
| And in the evening there was light. | |
