From Lucia Perillo’s “To Nightingales” (NER 25.1, 2004):

There is a bird for just about any kind of grief:
loon for the operatic grief, woodpecker for grief that comes like a hammer
and nightingales for the grief that is a fantasy—
face it, nightingales: here in the New World you don’t even exist.

* * *

And yet I hear you calling out from cyberspace,
your song that is constant while we grow old—
Keats said it first, and now a click on your breast
gives anyone ten seconds of your unchanging pennywhistle.

[read more]