I set out some moments before the daywake. Early enough to catch the moon in the act of slow-wheeling away, and head for the hundreds. Weighed down by Weizen, I lumber grandly. Far faster than you’d think to look at me. You’d scoff, I fancy, but if you had to keep up, if you dared to try, I’d steal the air from your little lungs, and that with a bag of einkorn and emmer under each arm.
To the birds. The maps are clearly marked, by you and by them. If you do this for a while, a heavy handful of times at least, then they’ll know you, sense you, recognise your hat and your hair, see you standing familiarly from a mile or more. And then they’ll come. They are not a quiet bird, simply because the world is all around them, and the moment they stop being dark dinosaurs on the top of high houses, that world is altered.
They are pulled toward you, at and then around you. One stands still and tall like a hurricane lamp in a walloping wind. And they head for your light.
I cannot figure why people hate them. I mean to say, I understand the reasons given, but the grammar of these reasons is far beyond me, and as tedious as the silly spikes being glued on or drilled into so many ledges and sills. It is the middling problem-solving of an aggrieved creature, to stick vicious little erections everywhere. And senseless, as the birds simply carry on.
You finish the fling, a bag is empty. If one looks inside the mass, seeks out keenly the hot heart of the group, one can see the birds of significance. The couples, the cripples, the old grey kings, the leavers, the left, and the lost. They nest, travel, feed and sleep together. The roost can be many buildings, streets, or even neighbourhoods wide. If you find them at the other end of the day, then the sound of their soft bodies shuffling, as the night begins to catch and they rise for the day’s last great flight, is a wonder. Surely the loudest whisper in the world.
To home, to bed, to tomorrow’s meeting.