Summer 2014: Poetry
And the King Was in the Counting House
by Geraldine Foote
Frenzy of fear likely dropped 3,000 birds. |
On the day the blackbirds fell from the sky, some spun like pinwheels, others flew blind into the sides of tall buildings. One struck a woman out walking her dog, which barked incessantly and tried to retrieve the winged carcass as she lay there. Convoys swerved to avoid feathered lumps littering the road and small red-winged missiles pummeled hoods and windshields. No, these are not the demanding crows, feathers slicked and strutting all shiny. These black birds are smaller, delicate, pinned with red flags like medals on their wings, greeting morning in phosphorus-like flashes. At dusk, they’re tiny drones swooping in for twilight soirees at the roost. The blackbirds were struck by lightening or stressed by the midnight explosions of revelers. Ringing a new year, the people became oblivious to how much this looks like the old year, not even seeing the winged ones striking ground, then staggering drunk to their deaths, become collateral. At first, the people thought Hitchcock’s “The Birds” had come, or the End Times, and they shunned the bodies piling up, running home to embrace and huddle with loved ones. The redwings, startled, in a frenzy of fear, flew, they say, despite poor eyesight, disoriented in dark, their trembling breasts bursting amid pyrotechnics or the blunt force trauma of thunder. A few unfortunates crashed beak-first into ground, not so dignified in death, not photographed, acknowledged or embraced; far more than four and twenty baked in an American pie, these delicate casualties shoved, warm, into the corner of time’s cupboard become a contented fiction.
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