An autumn poem

Heard my first night-migrating Redwing the other night, which reminded me of something I wrote a few years ago.

Redwings

Those were the last October nights to hear Redwings

Their thin, starving cries like the first snowflakes out of a black sky.

Every year, ear-strained, heading home from the pub

Feeling winter in the air and listening hard after every car.

You’d think it impossible, to catch the sweet, high breath of a bird

Over those roaring nights, you might just as well

Try to feel its pulse shaking the air, but there

You point straight up over the houses and into the starless

Where birds swim through an ink sky, drawing the winter in on a trailing edge of wing

And we hear them. Or heard them then, but never again.

Now I’m wondering just how much to miss

The loss of something that was always so hardly there

Their voices, and our own voices when

You’d ask me, and I’d say ‘yes, I heard one then’.