Murmuration

By Amy Watkins

It's #tbt! Enjoy this great one from SWWIM Every Day's archives!

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An osprey beats the wind with bowed wings,
steady till it drops and shakes in flight.
The wind catches and it rises again. 
I watch from the porch where I’ve come early
to stop avoiding our father’s call. Last night,
I turned the ringer off then on then off again,
swiped down to ignore but texted back.
There are two birds in the tree across the street 
and a third circling and circling, rising and falling 
in the wind from a distant hurricane. 
The phone rings. He wants to talk about you. 

They say each bird attends to just seven others, and,
in this way, a thousand starlings turn together 
like one creature. I’ll try not to make this a metaphor. 
Once, you and I climbed the hills outside 
Florence, Italy. Our dearest ones climbed with us 
and, because we were few and each one loved 
by all the others, I thought we made a kind of net 
that might hold the breaking world together. 
A murmuration of starlings unfurled like the aurora 
borealis, a sheer curtain caught in wind, 
twisting, tracing a path through twilight.

A hawk swoops low over the osprey nest. 
I think it might land, but it doesn’t. You ask to meet 
for coffee. Our father calls, and I don’t answer. 

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Amy Watkins is the author of the chapbooks Milk & Water, Lucky, and Wolf Daughter. She lives in Orlando with her husband and a large, cuddly, mixed-breed dog.

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