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The coat without a seam, and other poems cover

The coat without a seam, and other poems

Chapter 44: THE SINGER CHOOSES THE SONGS OF THE WIND
By Helen Gray Cone
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Poetry

About This Book

This collection of lyric and narrative poems moves between wartime urgency and reflective peace, offering sonnets, elegies, and short lyrics that interrogate sacrifice, patriotism, and the yearning for reconciliation. Voices range from public banners and martial images to intimate meditations on grief, domestic memory, and nature. Frequent religious and moral imagery frames contemplations of duty, loss, and the possibility of a unified humanity. Formal variety includes sonnet sequences and freer lyrics, often balancing didactic rhetoric with tender observation to consider how communities and individuals reckon with conflict, remembrance, and the promise of healing.

THE SINGER CHOOSES THE SONGS OF THE WIND

Henceforth I will sing no songs
But the songs that are fluent, irregular, swift, unguided:
I will turn no tunes but the tunes of the winds and the waters.
I know that the song of the bird is remembered, it changes not;
And I know that the song of the wind is unremembered;
But it stirs the ground of the heart while the song is a-singing,
And it flows from a vaster source than the song of the bird.
So I will sing the song of the wind in the long grass, by the river,
And the song of the wind in the dry and copper-brown oak-leaves,
In the autumnal season, so beautiful and sad,
And the song of the wind in the green cool ranks of the corn
As it stirs very lightly in the summer,
And the song of the wind in the pines, when the shadows are blue on the snow,
And the song, song, song, of the wind in the flapping flag,
And the winter-night song of the wind in the chimney,
And the swelling, lulling song of the swirling wind of the sea
That is blent with the plunge of the sea.