American Life in Poetry

Many poets have attempted to describe the way in which flocks of birds fly, as if they were steered by a single consciousness. In the following poem, David Allan Evans gives us a new metaphor for the way light shows through the flying birds. Evans is poet laureate of South Dakota.

Sixty Years Later I Notice, Inside A Flock Of Blackbirds,

the Venetian blinds

I dusted off

for my mother on

Saturday mornings,

closing, opening them

with the pull cord a few

times just to watch the outside

universe keep blinking,

as the flock suddenly

rises from November stubble,

hovers a few seconds,

closing, opening,

blinking, before it tilts,

then vanishes over a hill.