Featured Poem: Blackbird by John Drinkwater

This week we turn to English poet and dramatist John Drinkwater and his charming poem Blackbird.

While the Beast from the East has been putting us all through the ringer this past week, the unwelcome return of frosts and snow has been a surprising reminder of hidden beauties. We grow so familiar of our surroundings, be they urban, rural or suburban, but a blanket of snow can bring a perspective, and often a kinder one that usual.

Finding moments of magic in everyday surroundings, John Drinkwater's The Blackbird:

Blackbird

He comes on chosen evenings,
My blackbird bountiful, and sings
Over the garden of the town
Just at the hour the sun goes down.
His flight across the chimneys thick,
By some divine arithmetic,
Comes to his customary stack,
And couches there his plumage black,
And there he lifts his yellow bill,
Kindled against the sunset, till
These suburbs are like Dymock woods
Where music has her solitudes,
And while he mocks the winter's wrong
Rapt on his pinnacle of song,
Figured above our garden plots
Those are celestial chimney-pots.