William Shakespeare Look What You’ve Gone and Done, or European Starling Birds and the Winter Morning Sky Born

it was not the morning but the afternoon in actuality when all the Starlings did alight in the tree. it was however in the next morning that I remembered them and thought about them. they were still and to me, stoic for they didn’t really bother w/the wind or the world around them. the history of birds, their origin and migration routes; their interaction with rural landscapes and metropolitan areas, is as vast as the history of stamps, of books or of anything for that matter. but for me then, it was just a flock of birds in a tree. I didn’t know where they arrived from. I didn’t know what their ‘game’ was, or their ‘trick.’ I just knew that they blended in as if they were not there. 

nobody jumped from branch to branch. nobody talked. nobody else arrived and nobody left. hmm. real certainly,- they didn’t seem so, and more like a painting or dream; or perhaps a moment in a poem. nice, I thought. but I am a naive one and always have been so. I decided to read about them. someone had the idea of introducing every bird Shakespeare mentioned into North America. and it turned out that though they controlled some insect problems,- the Starlings were overly aggressive and caused many problems to things like crops and even infrastructure. 

I wondered about them, about the ones I had seen. maybe they were cold (I am a bleeding heart). later I glanced out there again. the Starlings had gone. only the branches remained,- vacant. and they weren’t talking either. and now the sky is born again. there used to be a Christian proselytizer that promoted his metaphysics by the lake to every manner of passerby. when the weather got bad, - cold, or a storm was coming, he would leave. it meant to me he was only an average devotee. a true captain is supposed to go down w/the ship so to speak. it is really the sky, for better or worse, that remains, not bird or person. the sky will one day whisper against reason and logic to some mystic, some seer, not, ,’Beware the Ides of March,’ but simply, ‘See. I tried to tell you. Stick with me. I am the forever kind.’