Based in Sydney, Australia, Foundry is a blog by Rebecca Thao. Her posts explore modern architecture through photos and quotes by influential architects, engineers, and artists.

The Right Bird

That April bird is back,
the one that cries: Right here, right here!
Right, right, right, right, right!
Not much melody,
but lots of self-confidence.
Maybe it’s a pathetic fallacy,
but then how often does nature speak
straight into our writing
with Zen advice?
And every time I hear this bird,
who seems to vanish after April
(or maybe merely changes passwords
to something I can’t recognize?),
it flashes me back to earlier Aprils
when I caught the sound of its call—
no, not just sound, but meaning!—
as I cleared up fallen twigs
or sipped morning tea on the porch.
The bird is back again—whereas I,
I never left:
I’m still right here, right?


Sibelan Forrester is a Professor of Russian in the Department of Modern Languages and Literatures at Swarthmore College. She is a translator, a poet and a member of the Mad Poets Society.

A Field of Flowers

Three Mile Island Woman March 28, 1979