When I have been flooding myself with black coffee

and moving slowly from my pajamas to underwear to blue corduroys

my birds have been carrying twigs and paper and leaves and straw

back and forth between the box elders and the maples.

They are building the Aswan Dam out there;

they are pulling heavy wheelbarrows up the hillsides;

they are dragging away old temples stone by stone;

they are wiping the sweat from their black bodies.

Ah, soon, soon they will be sitting down

like rich Mamelukes in their summer palaces on the Nile,

greeting the Arabian ambassador on the right,

greeting the Russian ambassador on the left,

and finally even the Jew himself, a guest

in his own garden, a holder of strange credentials,

one who is permitted to go through the carrots

only with special consent, one who is scolded

if he gets too close to the raspberry bushes,

one who looks with loving eyes at the water

and the light canoes that float down to the locks

for the meeting of princes in their little rubber tents —

by the picnic tables and the pump and the neat pile of gravel and the naked sycamores;

by the cement spillway that carries a ton of water a minute

to the old generating plant;

by the sandy beach down below where the fishermen sit

on their canvas stools feeding worms to the river —

worm after worm to the starving river,

in exchange for the silver life in their tin buckets,

in exchange for silence.