Two volumes on my summer reading list included Good Poems, American Places compiled by Garrison Keillor, and Amanda Lovelace’s collection The Witch Doesn’t Burn in This One. Both books have inspired me to dabble in poetry again.

As always, I can’t promise my poetry is any good. But there’s joy in the writing.

Murmuration

A flock of blackbirds
billowed
over a rural stretch
of Route 23.
Starlings, or grackles maybe,
thousands of
black pixels against
a blue canvas of sky,
shaping into
a half-formed image
before dissolving
like a dream
escaping waking’s grasp.

I pulled my car
to the shoulder to watch
them dance
to the metronome of
my hazard lights,
searching for
meaning in
their pattern as they
swooped, ascended,
condensed, separated.
Eventually they blended
into the tree line, and
I wondered if maybe

the meaning was
never in the pattern,
but only
in the flight.