There is a singer everyone has heard, / Loud, a mid-summer and a mid-wood bird, / Who makes the solid tree trunks sound again. / He says that leaves are old and that for flowers / Mid-summer is to spring as one to ten. / He says the early petal-fall is past / When pear and cherry bloom went down in showers / On sunny days a moment overcast; / And comes that other fall we name the fall. / He says the highway dust is over all. / The bird would cease and be as other birds / But that he knows in singing not to sing. / The question that he frames in all but words / Is what to make of a diminished thing.  -- "The Oven Bird" by Robert Frost (1916)

Above: Outbuilding, Orange County, NC