If you have not a bird inside you,
You have no reason to sing.
But if a pent bird chide you,
A beak and a bleeding wing,
Then you have reason to sing.
If merely you are clever
With thoughts and rhymes and words,
Then always your poems sever
The veins of our singing-birds,
With blades of glinting words.
Yet if a Song, without ending,
Inside you choke for breath,
And a beak, devouring, rending,
Tear through your lungs for breath,
Sing—or you bleed to death.
—Louis Golding (1895–1958), Sorrow of War, 1919