Richard Outram: Tundra Swans

Before the sun unsaid.
That we might under stand,
There having overhead
Passed such white command:

Superlative of flight
Wherein we turn to see,
In battering of light
Beyond ourselves, that we

Of this bright death behold
Within the inner eye
What we become: untold
God grieves the sky.

Published 2002. In the second line “under stand” (i.e. two words) is correct. Intensely concentrated thought-as-poetry: the swans themselves are barely present except as the poem's trigger.