Dawn Adventure

I stood in my window

looking at the double cherry:
A great height of white stillness,
Underneath a sky

the colour of milky grey jade.
Suddenly a crow flew between me and the tree --
Swooping, falling, in a shadow-black curve --
And blotted himself out in the blurred branches of a leafless ash.
There he stayed for some time,

and I could only distinguish him by his slight moving.

Then a wind caught the upper branches of the cherry,
And the long, white stems nodded up and down,

casually, to me in the window,
Nodded -- but overhead the grey jade clouds

passed slowly, indifferently, toward the sea.