Everyone Sang

Photo credit: mensatic from morguefile.com

Everyone suddenly burst out singing;   
And I was filled with such delight   
As prisoned birds must find in freedom,   
Winging wildly across the white   
Orchards and dark-green fields; on—on—and out of sight.            
     
Everyone’s voice was suddenly lifted;   
And beauty came like the setting sun:   
My heart was shaken with tears; and horror   
Drifted away ... O, but Everyone   
Was a bird; and the song was wordless; the singing will never be done.   
 
~ Siegfried Sassoon

Everyone Sang

Photo credit: mensatic from morguefile.com

Everyone suddenly burst out singing;   
And I was filled with such delight   
As prisoned birds must find in freedom,   
Winging wildly across the white   
Orchards and dark-green fields; on—on—and out of sight.            
     
Everyone’s voice was suddenly lifted;   
And beauty came like the setting sun:   
My heart was shaken with tears; and horror   
Drifted away ... O, but Everyone   
Was a bird; and the song was wordless; the singing will never be done.   
 
~ Siegfried Sassoon

Butterflies

Frail Travellers, deftly flickering over the flowers;

O living flowers against the heedless blue

Of summer days, what sends them dancing through

This fiery-blossom’d revel of the hours?

Theirs are the musing silences between

The enraptured crying of shrill birds that make

Heaven in the wood while summer dawns awake;

And theirs the faintest winds that hush the green.

And they are as my soul that wings its way

Out of the starlit dimness into morn:

And they are as my tremulous being—born

To know but this, the phantom glare of day.

-- Siegfried Sassoon

Butterflies

Frail Travellers, deftly flickering over the flowers;

O living flowers against the heedless blue

Of summer days, what sends them dancing through

This fiery-blossom’d revel of the hours?

Theirs are the musing silences between

The enraptured crying of shrill birds that make

Heaven in the wood while summer dawns awake;

And theirs the faintest winds that hush the green.

And they are as my soul that wings its way

Out of the starlit dimness into morn:

And they are as my tremulous being—born

To know but this, the phantom glare of day.

-- Siegfried Sassoon