Murmuration | ecstacy in movement
At first, there only came the hollowed chimes of wind against wind.
At first, there only came the hollowed chimes of wind against wind. Slow and monotone and droning, not a single sound, but a deep reverberation that rose through the stones of every wall in every house of this street and that street. Weaving, unfastening all the leaves from the rows of elm trees in a silent burst of unchecked spirit as the resonance collided, and became one. Along the stones they swept, closing doors and opening windows, taking with them all that was untethered from the earth: feathers and petals and bits of ribbon — until they blew by the starlings’s nests.
One moment they were peeking from within their warm shelters, give another and the grey film had lifted from their black eyes, and their little bodies were soaked with morning air. Inquisitive, perched between the buttress and amid the bare branches, hundereds of gleaming black pearls, watching, watching, watching. The long drawl of the wind was much too simple for the lively virtuosoes — their polite chattering and whistling was amplified in volume but not in form. At last, a youngling, feeling rather left out of all this clamour, hopped from his perch and was cast away into the sky.
He drew out his feathers, he steadied his wings, he called out but they were too far below to hear — suspended in flight: a moment frozen against the grey canvas of a dawning firmament.
The streaming of colours, the sounding of the trumpets, the flare as the sun parted the clouds like the prow of a ship on a smooth sea — he was seized by the light, and hurtled toward the ground…
As if given an invisible cue from a divine theatre, the actors filed in by the dozens and dozens and dozens — the beating of feathers and warble of tiny throats against the screech of a gale.
Up! Over the rooftops and the glimmerings of light, where sleepy candles were propped up against windowsills by numbed hands. Up! Over the heads of the street sellers and the choirboys — how piteous are us earthbound creatures. Up! Spiralling and mountaing the pinnacle of the chapel, past the highest gargoyle and the brass weathercock which held up their sky. Up! Till all was but a speck of dilation and retraction, of distant and faraway sounds; till the artifice built by human hands was cast about the land like a pebble thrown about in the waves — loved and forgotten, all the same.
And by the time the common folk donned their mitts to brave the chill, the flock had already passed.
