Editor's note: Warren is the first person in American history to be awarded the title of Poet Laureate of the Library of Congress. He has won one Pulitzer Prize for fiction and two Pulitzer Prizes for poetry. This record has not been broken yet. What does the nighthawk in this poem symbolize? Maybe it's just a metaphor, a metaphor about the dark night; or maybe it's a revelation, a messenger that brings darkness and silence at the same time. It prompts us to recollect knowledge and history in the place where time is broken, and to listen to the sound of the earth's rotation.

Evening Hawk

Robert Penn Warren

From plane of light to plane, wings dipping through

Geometries and orchids that the sunset builds,

Out of the peak’s black angularity of shadow, riding

The last tumultuous avalanche of

Light above pines and the guttural gorge,

The hawk comes.

His wing

Scythes down another day, his motion

Is that of the honed steel-edge, we hear

The crashless fall of stalks of Time.

The head of each stalk is heavy with the gold of our error.

Look! Look! he is climbing the last light

Who knows neither Time nor error, and under

Whose eye, unforgiving, the world, unforgiven, swings

Into shadow.

Long now,

The last thrush is still, the last bat

Now cruises in his sharp hieroglyphics. His wisdom

Is ancient, too, and immense. The star

Is steady, like Plato, over the mountain.

If there were no wind we might, we think, hear

The earth grind on its axis, or history

Drip in darkness like a leaking pipe in the cellar.