As a journalist, I’ve been lucky to cover events that have been downright inspiring for my poetry. Here’s a story I did for the Times back in the day:
Listening to the Faint Flutter of Birds Passing in the Night
And here’s the poem that resulted. It appeared in the Paterson Literary Review and my most recent book, Rise Wildly, from CavanKerry Press.
World Premier, Nocturnal Bird Migration Concert
–Metro Assignment, Prospect Park, Brooklyn
On high highways of wind, three to five billion
birds head north for the summer, sometime
singing, calling through fog, short tseeps
hard to distinguish, impossible to ignore.
Focus your spotting scope on the full moon
to see them whiz by, but that’s like watching
baseball through binoculars locked at first base.
They appear, tiny dots, benevolent squalls
on Doppler radar if you know how to look.
Why bother seeing a four-inch finch 500 feet up,
when the clamor, everywhere, reaches for miles?
Why not just listen, past midnight, past words?
The sounds form their own cartography.
If you’re an hour north of a lake, you’ll hear
birds for an hour, then a lake-shaped, hour-shaped
silence, since few birds depart from water,
then raucous hellos from the southern shore.
Listening, hearing: acts of fond hope.
Tina Kelley's Poetry Blog 