Articles tagged with: animal
Impossibly complex abstraction reigns,
cobbling together a life from scavenged freedom.
Vultures from a trip to South Beach earlier this year.
Just a portion of the sky filled with hundreds of birds
near the Oleta River.
. . . and a detail:
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Turkey Vulture | Cathartes aura
A energetic songbird makes a noisy show
of its disapproval with an interloping starling,
a frontal assault on the open border policy of my backyard,
soon to take a sharp turn toward the unruly.
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Sparrow | Passer domesticus
Starling | Sturnus vulgaris
Torn between adventure and hunger,
the prodigal son appears,
only to disappear again,
leaving the sky littered with nonsense.
A hungry young starling harasses its parent.
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Starling | Sturnus vulgaris
Stunning even the air,
a surprise attack with the light touch
of a buzz saw,
a hostile treasure hunt
bears unlikely fruit.
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Grackle | Quiscalus quiscula
Alert to the rumor of twilights past and still to come,
a Black-crowned Nightn Heron hunts,
its understated style belying
a complex personality as simple
as a solar eclipse.
From a trip to Miami Beach in March 2010.
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Black-crowned Night-Heron | Nycticorax nycticorax
A shout-out with maximum sass,
breathing fire in a wild party’s aftermath,
fuelled by old seeds and wind,
the insane sky tyrant leads me nowhere.
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Starling | Sturnus vulgaris
A mother starling leads an intrepid fledgling higher,
an ordinary flight breaking adolescent awkwardness,
a shared appetite for more speed.
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Starling | Sturnus vulgaris
Slipping past me, a jay’s sudden leap,
a memory of beating wings create a slight
disturbance in a rattletrap universe.
One of the many birds featured in
my book Aerial Acrobats: Life lived in the air.
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Blue jay | Cyanocitta cristata
An aerial boom box turned up to eleven,
a bottomless pit of need,
hunger wrapped in feathers,
blowing the top off Mt. Everest.
How loud can you say FEED ME?
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Grackle | Quiscalus quiscula
Against the dying sun, an experiment in ecstatic abandon,
two starlings tease, challenge and reflect each other,
shadows trailing the twilight comet.
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Starling | Sturnus vulgaris
Warm and cold challenge each other,
recoil from each other,
golds as strident as a trumpet’s cry.
The grackles are back, the blaze of the setting sun
trailing in their wake.
