VI. The Stare's Nest by My Window
The bees build in the crevices
Of loosening masonry, and there
The mother birds bring grubs and flies.
My wall is loosening; honey-bees,
Come build in the empty house of the stare.We are closed in, and the key is turned
On our uncertainty; somewhere
A man is killed, or a house burned,
Yet no clear fact to be discerned:
Come build in he empty house of the stare.A barricade of stone or of wood;
Some fourteen days of civil war;
Last night they trundled down the road
That dead young soldier in his blood:
Come build in the empty house of the stare.We had fed the heart on fantasies,
The heart's grown brutal from the fare;
More Substance in our enmities
Than in our love; O honey-bees,
Come build in the empty house of the stare.– William Butler Yeats (part 6 from a 1923 longer poem "Meditations in time of Civil War").
Note that the word "stare" here is an Irishism for the bird called starling, I think. And the civil war in question is the Irish war for independence from the UK.
I really like this poem. It combines something deep and symbolic with a very immediate observation of nature in the moment.