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’.
That's a good one, aiki - I can almost see you straining to hear them.