A Bird's Nest Made of White Reed Fibers

A Bird's Nest Made of White Reed Fibers

1.
The nest is white as the foam thrown up when the sea hits rocks. It is translucent like those cloudy transoms above Victorian doors. It is swirled like the hair of those intense nurses, gray and tangled after long nights in the Crimean wards. This wren's nest is something made and then forgotten, like our own life that we will entirely forget in the grave when we are about to be pushed up on shore like some stone, ecstatic and black.

2.
The nest is white as the foam thrown up
when the sea hits rocks.
It is translucent like those
cloudy transoms above Victorian doors.
It is swirled like the hair
of those intense nurses, gray and tangled
after long nights in the Crimean wards.
This wren's nest is something made
and then forgotten, like our own life
that we will entirely forget
in the grave when we are about to be
pushed up on shore like some stone,
ecstatic and black.

Robert Bly

Posted over on Poetry Daily

1. Robert Bly's prose poem.
2. Line Breaks by Glenn Buttkus