Poem For The Week

For its first five years the bird does not return to land.

Home is not land’s end,
a fledgling nest
of food and rest.

Home is the wind
you glide, the sea
you glean unendingly

until a hunger comes
to Wheel and Go–
not Home

but what you can’t yet know:
the clambering of kind
on kind.

John Barr/The Century Association