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Column 502

Sixty Years Later I Notice, Inside A Flock Of Blackbirds,

Intro by Ted Kooser
11.02.2014

Many poets have attempt­ed to describe the way in which flocks of birds fly, as if they were steered by a sin­gle con­scious­ness. In the fol­low­ing poem, David Allan Evans gives us a new metaphor for the way light shows through the fly­ing birds. Evans is Poet Lau­re­ate of South Dakota.

Sixty Years Later I Notice, Inside A Flock Of Blackbirds,

the Venetian blinds
I dusted off

for my mother on
Saturday mornings,

closing, opening them
with the pull cord a few

times just to watch the outside
universe keep blinking,

as the flock suddenly
rises from November stubble,

hovers a few seconds,
closing, opening,

blinking, before it tilts,
then vanishes over a hill.

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Disclaimer

We do not accept unsolicited submissions

We do not accept unsolicited submissions. American Life in Poetry is made possible by The Poetry Foundation (www.poetryfoundation.org), publisher of Poetry magazine. It is also supported by the Department of English at the University of Nebraska-Lincoln. Poem copyright ©2013 by David Allan Evans from his most recent book of poems, the Carnival, the Life, Settlement House, 2013. Poem reprinted by permission of David Allan Evans and the publisher. Introduction copyright © 2024 by The Poetry Foundation.