Sky without birds

The movement in the sky this evening was very fast: it changed from whipped coffee cream to crunchy apricot to this (which I decided was inedible) within ten minutes, all while I was waiting in vain for some birds to liven things up. I watched it from the disused railway bridge that once delivered coal to the south Oxford gasworks. The gasworks site is now a meadow, more full of buttercups this year than I have ever seen it, and this evening the surprising home to two young men who were chatting as I arrived and still deep in conversation in the bright yellow when I left half an hour later. They made me realise what a feminine trope buttercup fields are.