To a Robin in Lent

You were the first one back,
the first one back.

You clung to a bare black branch,
your habit to choose Sundays in March,
wind whirling around you,
sky grey as a shroud, and wet,
to sing to the flowers, not there yet.

You were not loud.
No, not at all.
But you knew what you were doing.

Elizabeth Spires is the author of six collections of poetry, most recently The Wave-Maker. She teaches at Goucher College in Baltimore. This poem first appeared in The Wave-Maker: Poems (W.W. Norton and Company, 2008) and is used with permission of the author.

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