Celebrating Draw a Picture of a Bird Day through Poetry

Draw a Picture of a Bird Day is celebrated on April 8th every year. Typically, people celebrate this day by drawing birds and sharing their images, according to Wikipedia. Here is a poem by Harold Edward Monro (March 14, 1879 - March 16, 1932) that we wanted to feature for this eventful day. 

The Bird At Dawn 

By Harold Edward Monro

    What I saw was just one eye

    In the dawn as I was going:

    A bird can carry all the sky

    In that little button glowing.

    Never in my life I went

    So deep into the firmament.

    He was standing on a tree,

    All in blossom overflowing;

    And he purposely looked hard at me,

    At first, as if to question merrily:

    'Where are you going?'

    But next some far more serious thing to say:

    I could not answer, could not look away.

    Oh, that hard, round, and so distracting eye:

    Little mirror of all sky! -

    And then the after-song another tree

    Held, and sent radiating back on me.

    If no man had invented human word,

    And a bird-song had been

    The only way to utter what we mean,

    What would we men have heard,

    What understood, what seen,

    Between the trills and pauses, in between

    The singing and the silence of a bird?

Monro was a British poet and the proprietor of the Poetry Bookshop in London, which helped many famous poets bring their work before the public.

*This poem is found in public domain.