In your quiet garden wakes a magic tumult
Of winged choristers that keep the Festival of Dawn,
Blithely rise the carols in richly cadenced rapture,
From lyric throats of amber, of ebony and fawn.
The bulbul and the oriole, the honey-bird and shama
Flit among high boughs that drip with nectar and with dew,
Upon the grass the wandering gull parades its sea-washed silver,
The hoopoe and the kingfisher their bronze and sapphire
blue.
Wild gray pigeons dreaming of a home amid the tree-tops,
Fill their beaks with silken down and slender banyan twigs,
But the jade-green gipsy parrots are only gay marauders,
And pause upon their sun-ward flight to plunder red ripe figs.
In your gracious garden there is joy and fostering freedom,
Nesting place and singing space for every feathered thing,
O Master of the Birds, grant sanctuary and shelter
Also to a homing bird that bears a broken wing.
English