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Tricia Lyons

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Sky High

What are they doing up there, swirling and tossing like carbon papers possessed?
They must be rooks, in bare-faced, baggy-breeched bacchanal,
black as Rectors in clerical garb, whirling and stalling and diving
as if the wind had blown in for their express delight — a mobile playground
for switchback games at breakneck speed, riding the clouds, the black-plumed banks,
in funereal helter-skelter.

Here below the wind is tossing and twisting the trees, branches are lashing
and whipping the wind. Leaves are being stripped, are streaming in torrents,
sideways, pitted by rain; swirling, gritty, terrestrial clouds of foliage:
everything in uproar, thrumming, the sky dark, the clouds darker still,
purple overlaid charcoal.
Such high-drama weather; such a to-do.

Crows have been wheeling, surfing the gusts. Now they walk the grass,
turning from side to side with each advancing leg – portly and ponderous,
Parsons in black, studying the grass for earthworms or theosophical insight.
While, up aloft, the Reverends in breeches are giddy with oxygen,
are giddily roistering, higher than kites.

Page(s) 41

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