Classic Poem

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.