Praise Them
The birds don't alter space.They reveal it.
The sky never fills with any leftover flying.
They leave nothing to trace.
It is our own astonishment collects in chill air.
Be glad.
They equal their due moment never begging,
and enter ours without parting day.
See how three birds in a winter tree make the tree barer.
Two fly away, and new rooms open in December.
Give up what you guessed about a whirring heart, the little
beaks and claws, their constant hunger.
We're the nervous ones.
If even one of our violent number
could be gentle long enough that one of them
found it safe inside our finally untroubled and
untroubling gaze, who wouldn't hear
what singing completes us?

~ Li-Young Lee ~

(Book of My Nights)
https://www.panhala.net/Archive/Praise_Them.html


Li-Young Lee (b. 1957) was born in Jakarta, Indonesia, of Chinese parents. In 1959, after spending nineteen months in jail as a political prisoner, Lee's father fled Indonesia with his family. The family traveled through Hong Kong, Macau, and Japan before settling in the United States. Lee studied at several American universities, earning his B.A. at the University of Pittsburgh, and taught at various schools, including Northwestern University and the University of Iowa. During 1990, he traveled in Indonesia and China gathering material for an autobiographical prose work.
His work has been honored with numerous prizes and awards, including a Guggenheim Fellowship in 1987. His second book of poems, The City in Which I Love You (1990), was the Lamont Poetry Selection of the Academy of American Poets. His most recent book is The Winged.

"I'm trying to get to a condition in the poems … that somehow we can look at all of creation and human endeavor. And even in spite of all the atrocities and all the stuff we perpetrate on each other, that, somehow, we can come to the conclusion that being alive is good. And speaking in poems is good and that it's valuable." Lee says.