In a Forest Garden - April

Now April comes, and Autumn with its frost
   To sear and slay the frail things of the earth
So that their fragile beauty is all lost
In leaf and blossom, littered and wind-tossed,
   No more of worth;
Yet, as in recompense for all of these,
To paint with transient glory alien trees,
   And wake a newer, richer note of mirth
In bushland melodies.

For Autumn is not sorrow.  April laughs:
   All beauty changes, but it does not die.
Now at a mellower cup the roysterer quaffs;
With tipsy song the Derwent chides and chaffs;
   And, shouting high,
Triumphant Magpies lilt a wilder song
Amid the Messmates, where the whole day long,
   With scarce a break in that incessant cry,
Calls many a Currawong.

Early this morning as I lay abed
   A young Thrush tried his newly-found refrain.
His in a hawthorn close beside my head,
Softly and secretly, as if in dread,
   He piped the strain
Over and over -- just a whispered note
Gurgling and bubbling in his soft, young throat --
   Then he would pause, and wait, and try again,
Ruffling his prim grey coat.

No, Autumn is not sorrow ... Soon his call
   Shall greet each morning as a matins bell;
For Thrushes sing in Autumn best of all.
They seem to win new freedom in the Fall
   And fain would tell
The world of all the joyousness they find;
Well knowing that, for all her fickle mind,
   To the young innocent that love her well
April can be most kind.