Journey round the garden 5

When One Has Lived a Long Time Alone (Galway Kinnell)

5
When one has lived a long time alone
and listens at morning to mourning doves
sound their kyrie eleison, or to the small thing
spiritualizing upon a twig cry, "pewit-phoebe!"
or to grasshoppers scratch their thighs' needfire
awake, or to peabody birds at midday send their
schoolboys' whistlings across the field, and at dusk,
their undamped chinks, as from marble cutters' chisels,
or at nightfall to polliwogs just rearranged into frogs
raise thier ave verum corpus - listens to those
who hop or fly call down upon us the mercy
of other tongues - one hears them as inner voices,
when one has lived a long time alone.