BIRDS OF BATTLE.

Keats sings in peerless stanzas

To the lovely Nightingale —

And Shelley tells of the Skylark

Above the summer gale —

But I to the Birds of Battle

Needs lift my numbers frail.

For far by the out-flung wires,

Where the shell-torn tree stumps stand,

And over the barren, hole-strewn tracks

Of the wastes of No Man's Land,

In the morning light and the black of night,

The Birds of Battle stand.

No shrieking shots may quell them —

Nor gloom nor storm nor rain,

As out of the crash or stillness

A wondrous, shrill refrain

Cuts clear and glad and lithesome

Above the death-strewn plain.

The weary heavens welcome,

And echo back the song,

And weary soldiers linger,

And pause to listen long

To the one glad cry in a war-torn sky,

That holds so much of wrong.