Restless Air

Perhaps this signals, more than anything, that our half-arsed Indian summer is over. The starlings (at least I presume they are starlings) are looking decidedly restless. I imagine avian excitement is rather different to ours, but their shufflings and nervy takeoffs and circlings around telegraph wires, flagpoles and lampposts put me in mind of airports, and the magnetic pull of warmer, more exotic destinations.

I wrote a poem about their movements in the trees in Leicester Square in London:

Soundtrack

The starlings in the trees of Leicester Square,
on a busy, end-of-winter evening, are a full-fledged

metropolis whirring and throbbing overhead,
making connections, working into the threads

chirping mobiles, strands of talk and laughter
from a lengthening restless queue outside The Empire.