To celebrate National Poetry Month, we are choosing poems from some recent collections. This one is from The Atlantic Tunnel: Selected Poems by Paul Farley (Faber and Faber, $25, 9780865479173/0865479178, May 11, 2010).
For the House Sparrow,
In Decline
Your numbers fall and it's tempting to think
you're deserting our suburbs and estates
like your cousins at Pompeii; that when you return
to bathe in dust and build your nests again
in a roofless world where no one hears your cheeps,
only a starling's modern mimicry
will remind you of how you once supplied
the incidental music of our lies.
--Selected by Marilyn Dahl