Published April 06 2020    Biblioasis Press 

Excerpt from the poem "Starling Nation"

Such a ruckus in the maples,
Such bone-rattling chorusing
Those starling chortlers were making
In the hollows of my ears:
A scene out of Wagner, out of something mad,
A world before humankind, Jurassic parliament,
The sun the earliest god.

And then in an instant they were gone, —
They’d advanced in their swarms, in their murmurations
To other objectives, other trees, other neighbourhoods.
A pair of jays inherited the silence
While a crow lumbered from branch to branch,
The instigator perhaps, heckler shouted down.
And I was no wiser than before, but I was humbled:
What fear in those creatures, what deep-ranging response
To all that would undo their starling nation.