starlings

It was a swelling sea of starlings
that drifted across the sky,
the flat gray of sky
which had refused
for the better part of three weeks
to see a life of brighter things, and I

could hear them:
the frantic flapping of countless wings
and their metallic call, little and shrill
but it was their wings I noticed mostly
and everything else went still.

I forgot about the cars rumbling past,
and my cardigan flapping open,
unaware of even my daughter at my heels,
shivering and barefoot in January's brittle air.

I watched them with an eye more keen
to watch figures flit across a screen
than the black ink spot of a bird 
against a formless sky.

I watched until they became one idea,
one mind, a fluid swarm,
siphoned into a ribbon of silken Braille,
their collective motion
creating billowing images,
a meaning that I could not decipher.

I wonder now what it was all for:
why this January afternoon?
why these hills over which thin grids of neighborhoods lie?
what was so special about my rooftop, my patchwork of green
that they would fly, orchestrated and with purpose,
to the skeletal trees just over there, to settle at once 
and preen their feathers
and share their stories in clacking voices
as well as their berries and half-frozen worms.

Why had I never seen them before?
By the thousands in a flight that became a dance
with a meaning too intelligent,
too instinctual,
for me to understand.