Thrush!

[wildsweetone]

no silly, not that kind!

please share your favourite poem that contains a thrush - i've been noticing in the last few days that there's DOZENS!

 

[Guest]

Let me the 1st



Coming

by Philip Larkin (1950)

On longer evenings,
Light, chill and yellow,
Bathes the serene
Foreheads of houses.
A thrush sings,
Laurel-surrounded
In the deep bare garden,
Its fresh-peeled voice
Astonishing the brickwork.
It will be spring soon,
It will be spring soon-
And I, whose childhood
Is a forgotten boredom,
Feel like a child
Who comes on a scene
Of adult reconciling,
And can understand nothing
But the unusual laughter,
And starts to be happy.

 

[Lauren Hynde]

A Thrush Before Dawn
by Alice Meynell

A voice peals in this end of night
- A phrase of notes resembling stars,
Single and spiritual notes of light.
- What call they at my window-bars?
- - The South, the past, the day to be,
- - An ancient infelicity.

Darkling, deliberate, what sings
- This wonderful one, alone, at peace?
What wilder things than song, what things
- Sweeter than youth, clearer than Greece,
- - Dearer than Italy, untold
- - Delight, and freshness centuries old?

And first first-loves, a multitude,
- The exaltation of their pain;
Ancestral childhood long renewed;
- And midnights of invisible rain;
- - And gardens, gardens, night and day,
- - Gardens and childhood all the way.

What Middle Ages passionate,
- O passionless voice! What distant bells
Lodged in the hills, what palace state
- Illyrian! For it speaks, it tells,
- - Without desire, without dismay,
- - Some morrow and some yesterday.

All-natural things! But more—Whence came
- This yet remoter mystery?
How do these starry notes proclaim
- A graver still divinity?
- - This hope, this sanctity of fear?
- - O innocent throat! O human ear!

 

[flyguy69]

Grit

Grit streaks
his whiskered jaw, gathers in creases
at the boot-heel end of day.
Lunchbox clanks arrival
and he accepts the kitchen stool
of slippers and solace.

She finds the cords
in his back, unplaits
his twisted strength. Her gift

is vigor, fresh breath
on dim coals. She pushes lust
through his skin, a warming tide
that laps his core. She claims

this man, owns him
with friction heat
and lipped suggestion.

Murmured steps,
incremental,
back from the edge
of exhaustion, lift

his eyes to hers,

his mouth to hers,

his fingers to her swaying hair.

He swells to his feet, twists
in her grip, flesh reanimated
in her kitchen-lightning
laboratory. Turgor
that strains clocks
and splits seams splits
and lifts her

countertop

and claws away
the cotton cares of day.

Salt seeps urgent,
eager for the slide,
the slip of heels
on hips. She hisses

clenched submission
to his china-rattling
need, and licks
the grit from his cheek.

-------
Oh, sorry. I thought you said "thrust."

 

[SeattleRain]

damn! I think I have to change my panties.

you wrote this, right?

Grit

Grit streaks
his whiskered jaw, gathers in creases
at the boot-heel end of day.
Lunchbox clanks arrival
and he accepts the kitchen stool
of slippers and solace.

She finds the cords
in his back, unplaits
his twisted strength. Her gift

is vigor, fresh breath
on dim coals. She pushes lust
through his skin, a warming tide
that laps his core. She claims

this man, owns him
with friction heat
and lipped suggestion.

Murmured steps,
incremental,
back from the edge
of exhaustion, lift

his eyes to hers,

his mouth to hers,

his fingers to her swaying hair.

He swells to his feet, twists
in her grip, flesh reanimated
in her kitchen-lightning
laboratory. Turgor
that strains clocks
and splits seams splits
and lifts her

countertop

and claws away
the cotton cares of day.

Salt seeps urgent,
eager for the slide,
the slip of heels
on hips. She hisses

clenched submission
to his china-rattling
need, and licks
the grit from his cheek.

-------
Oh, sorry. I thought you said "thrust."

 

[wildsweetone]

lmao

dear god i'm gonna die laughing! i needed that thank you dear.

i was reading and thought where the heck is the thrush going to come in on this???

 

[flyguy69]

damn! I think I have to change my panties.

you wrote this, right?

Yes, it appears your av is doing that "female ejaculation" thing that I hear so much about these days.

 

[Guest]

Home Thoughts, From Abroad

Oh, to be in England
Now that April's there,
And whoever wakes in England
Sees, some morning, unaware,
That the lowest boughs and the brushwood sheaf
Round the elm-tree bole are in tiny leaf,
While the chaffinch sings on the orchard bough
In England—now!

And after April, when May follows,
And the whitethroat builds, and all the swallows!
Hark, where my blossomed pear-tree in the hedge
Leans to the field and scatters on the clover
Blossoms and dewdrops—at the bent spray's edge—
That's the wise thrush; he sings each song twice over,
Lest you should think he never could recapture
The first fine careless rapture!
And though the fields look rough with hoary dew,
All will be gay when noontide wakes anew
The buttercups, the little children's dower
—Far brighter than this gaudy melon-flower!

Robert Browning -

 

[eagleyez]

ah, to guide a thrush of laughter
to let slide a thrush of air
from wind meant to dry a daughters hair
a daughter Ive never had.

oh, to feel a thrush of hummingbird wings
poised up front of a coneflower or black-eyed suzy-
lavender hedgerows just a memory to me
a daughter Ive never had.

to rush a thrush of thunderheads
piled high for to jump a little boy instead
daddy rakes the garden
for the daughter Ive never had
save for the sweetheart drawings
under brother's
no rush,

she outlines crayon
and says "shush,"
magnetic overlays
the refrigerator door
sweeping closed with a thrush.

Woosh was the sound
Father loves the hallowed ground
She says "shhh" in a dream
Stories written for sisters lush
Boystown whirls for the thrust of that thrush.

 

[rosco rathbone]

Thrush is harbinger of the night sweats.

Or is it the other way 'round.

 

[Rybka]

The Darkling Thrush

I leant upon a coppice gate
When Frost was spectre-gray,
And Winter's dregs made desolate
The weakening eye of day.
The tangled bine-stems scored the sky
Like strings of broken lyres,
And all mankind that haunted nigh
Had sought their household fires.

The land's sharp features seemed to be
The Century's corpse outleant,
His crypt the cloudy canopy,
The wind his death-lament.
The ancient pulse of germ and birth
Was shrunken hard and dry,
And every spirit upon earth
Seemed fervourless as I.

At once a voice outburst among
The bleak twigs overhead
In a full-hearted evensong
Of joy illimited;
An aged thrush, frail, gaunt, and small,
In blast-beruffled plume,
Had chosen thus to fling his soul
Upon the growing gloom.

So little cause for carolings
Of such ecstatic sound
Was written on terrestrial things
Afar or nigh around,
That I could think there trembled through
His happy good-night air
Some blessed Hope, whereof he knew
And I was unaware.

~ Thomas Hardy (12/31/1899)


Glad you asked! This is one of my all-time favorites. (Notice when it was written. - Makes it even more meaningful.)

 

[wildsweetone]

wow these sure are GREAT poems, and that includes the Lit Poets too!

Rybka i am earmarking that poem in my Hardy book, thank you!



any more? i swear there's a mass of thrush poems. and so there should be, their song is utterly beautiful.

 

[Angeline]

A Hermit Thrush
Amy Clampitt

Nothing's certain. Crossing, on this longest day,
the low-tide-uncovered isthmus, scrambling up
the scree-slope of what at high tide
will be again an island,

to where, a decade since well-being staked
the slender, unpremeditated claim that brings us
back, year after year, lugging the
makings of another picnic—

the cucumber sandwiches, the sea-air-sanctified
fig newtons—there's no knowing what the slamming
seas, the gales of yet another winter
may have done. Still there,

the gust-beleaguered single spruce tree,
the ant-thronged, root-snelled moss, grass
and clover tuffet underneath it,
edges frazzled raw

but, like our own prolonged attachment, holding.
Whatever moral lesson might commend itself,
there's no use drawing one,
there's nothing here

to seize on as exemplifying any so-called virtue
(holding on despite adversity, perhaps) or
any no-more-than-human tendency—
stubborn adherence, say,

to a wholly wrongheaded tenet. Though to
hold on in any case means taking less and less
for granted, some few things seem nearly
certain, as that the longest day

will come again, will seem to hold its breath,
the months-long exhalation of diminishment
again begin. Last night you woke me
for a look at Jupiter,

that vast cinder wheeled unblinking
in a bath of galaxies. Watching, we traveled
toward an apprehension all but impossible
to be held onto—

that no point is fixed, that there's no foothold
but roams untethered save by such snells,
such sailor's knots, such stays
and guy wires as are

mainly of our own devising. From such an
empyrean, aloof seraphic mentors urge us
to look down on all attachment,
on any bonding, as

in the end untenable. Base as it is, from
year to year the earth's sore surface
mends and rebinds itself, however
and as best it can, with

thread of cinquefoil, tendril of the magenta
beach pea, trammel of bramble; with easings,
mulchings, fragrances, the gray-green
bayberry's cool poultice—

and what can't finally be mended, the salt air
proceeds to buff and rarefy: the lopped carnage
of the seaward spruce clump weathers
lustrous, to wood-silver.

Little is certain, other than the tide that
circumscribes us that still sets its term
to every picnic—today we stayed too long
again, and got our feet wet—

and all attachment may prove at best, perhaps,
a broken, a much-mended thing. Watching
the longest day take cover under
a monk's-cowl overcast,

with thunder, rain and wind, then waiting,
we drop everything to listen as a
hermit thrush distills its fragmentary,
hesitant, in the end

unbroken music. From what source (beyond us, or
the wells within?) such links perceived arrive—
diminished sequences so uninsistingly
not even human—there's

hardly a vocabulary left to wonder, uncertain
as we are of so much in this existence, this
botched, cumbersome, much-mended,
not unsatisfactory thing.

 

[Guest]

Come In

As I came to the edge of the woods,
Thrush music -- hark!
Now if it was dusk outside,
Inside it was dark.

Too dark in the woods for a bird
By sleight of wing
To better its perch for the night,
Though it still could sing.

The last of the light of the sun
That had died in the west
Still lived for one song more
In a thrush's breast.

Far in the pillared dark
Thrush music went --
Almost like a call to come in
To the dark and lament.

But no, I was out for stars;
I would not come in.
I meant not even if asked;
And I hadn't been.

Robert Frost


I'd not seen this poem before and just happened on it last night.

 

[Tzara]

Thrush
C. K. Williams

Often in our garden these summer evenings a thrush
and her two nearly grown offspring come to forage.
The chicks are fledged, the mother’s teaching them
to find their own food; one learns, the other can’t—
its skull is misshapen, there’s no eye on one side
and the beak is malformed: whatever it finds, it drops.

It seems to regress then, crouching before the mother,
gullet agape, as though it were back in the nest:
she always finds something else for it to eat,
but her youngster’s all but as large as she is,
she’s feeding two of herself—she’ll abandon it soon,
and migrate; the chick will doubtlessly starve.

Humans don’t do that, just leave, though a young woman
I saw rushing through the train station this morning
with a Down’s syndrome infant in a stroller
I thought might if she could. The child, a girl,
was giggling so hard at how splendidly fast
they were going that she’d half-fallen from her seat,

until the mother braked abruptly, hissed “Shush!”
and yanked her back into place. The baby,
alarmed, subsided but still intrepidly smiled as the mother—
she wasn’t eighteen, with scuffed shoes, smudged eye-liner,
and a cardboard valise—sped on, wielding carriage
and child as a battering ram through the oncoming crush.

The thrushes have been rapidly crisscrossing the lawn
in and out of the flowerbeds all through the long dusk,
now they leave, the rest of the birds go quiet—
I can hear someone far off calling her children to bed—
and it’s the turn of the bats, who materialize, vanish,
and appear again, their own after-selves, their own ghosts.

 

[Guest]

The wreck “Thrush”

from the Greek

“This wood that cooled my forehead
at times when noon burned my veins
will flower in other hands. Take it, I’m giving it to you;
look, it’s wood from a lemon-tree…”
I heard the voice
as I was gazing at the sea trying to make out
a ship they’d sunk there years ago;
it was called “Thrush,” a small wreck; the masts,
broken, swayed at odd angles deep underwater, like
tentacles,
or the memory of dreams, marking the hull:
vague mouth of some huge dead sea-monster
extinguished in the water. Calm spread all around.

And gradually, in turn, other voices followed,*
whispers thin and thirsty
emerging from the other side of the sun, the dark side;
you might say they longed for a drop of blood to drink;*
familiar voices, but I couldn’t distinguish one from the
other.
And then the voice of the old man reached me; I felt it
quietly falling into the heart of day,
as though motionless:
“And if you condemn me to drink poison, I thank you.
Your law will be my law; how can I go
wandering from one foreign country to another, a rolling
stone.
I prefer death.
Who’ll come out best only God knows.”

Countries of the sun yet you can’t face the sun.
Countries of men yet you can’t face man.

by George Seferis

 

[eagleyez]

thrush
goes the wind
bats hang upside down
again

flying dogs
no birds
these flushed
half a moon away
in the woosh

thrush goes the song
gone with the stars
these flushed
along with the headlights
on decorator cars

push goes the word
g'nite says the bird
against the norm
formless the form
in the shadow's rush

thrush rolls the tongue
ancient tra la la
strolls the harmonica long
children memorize the song
whispers la dee da.

strings bend n bellow
the flush
cards dealt a straight
royal in its voice
remember all's a brush
dogteams mush
quiet thrusts a thrush
thru woods
a clearing night
the westward jewel
predicts venus and her light.

 

[Guest]

you're hot today, TGIF?

 

[Angeline]

you're hot today, TGIF?

And he writes them in about three minutes. He has been verrrrry poemy of late. It's good.