east of the fog

A poem by Sara Teasdale

There Will Come Soft Rains

(War Time)

There will come soft rains and the smell of the ground,
And swallows circling with their shimmering sound;

And frogs in the pools singing at night,
And wild plum trees in tremulous white,

Robins will wear their feathery fire
Whistling their whims on a low fence-wire;

And not one will know of the war, not one
Will care at last when it is done.

Not one would mind, neither bird nor tree
If mankind perished utterly;

And Spring herself, when she woke at dawn,
Would scarcely know that we were gone.

Ray Bradbury used this poem in a short story of the same title; the title and / or the words have been set to music by many composers.

In his 2020 book, Red Stilts, Ted Kooser published a poem – Spring Landscape. It reminded me of a long distant afternoon in Ann Arbor where coming out of the Harlan Hatcher Graduate Library, I discovered a robin’s egg shell at my feet. It was a sudden reminder of both spring and the wider world.