Charlotte Tanner
Fiction Editor
That dark cloud that flows fluidly against the wind,
their feathers flapping in time to keep formation.
It’s shape is a current, a river of movement that bounds
until one is lost and must beat its wings in double-time to
find its way back, back to its spot high in the air.
How perfect, how precise they must be,
to keep in rhythm and spaces so tight as to not break.
They travel hundreds of miles like a whisper,
so soft and low to our ears but we imagine the sound
they must make as if we were among them ourselves.
There is no time that I wish to fly than when I see their
togetherness, their accuracy, their beauty.
How they weave and dive to and fro, stopping,
but only for a moment, before all at once rising together.
Rising to the sky as a wave crests upon itself.
What takes a band of humans months or years of work,
a flock masters at its first plummet from the nest.
Their instinct for survival breathes a sigh to my lungs,
and I know that something must have created this,
created them to know just what to do.