Natural observations, pt.1, notes

Pre-analytic observations taken from a hard stone perch
  
(not a poem, but observational notes)

There’s the rhythmic low splashing chorus of reflected sea bay waves some fifty feet to my right.

Sitting on stone cobbled aggregate uncomfortably below knee-high, then swing one then two legs over the land bound side, feet anchoring to one point of the breakwater boulders below.

Facing away from the shoreline to a cleft in a rising bluff, a large long grown shrub now centered in middle view.

Sounds begin to change my ear. Voices easy to ignore. Voices with wings.

Dense green foliage as a crown gives shuttered view to the spider-web of sheltered branches within its skirt. As a dress blown aside, limbs are more exposed lower and to the right, three-some feet below the summit rock wall.

Air drops away beneath.

Sporadic gull squawks clamor for attention, but there’s a lower ground of voice and wings scattered about and many within that green.

Small of voice yet swiftly crisp, focus gathers close. Swift and brief as is their flight from out the hidden core of limbs, then too seeing leaves shimmer in response to their returning roost.

First one then another, another, then add one more. Maybe a tribe of ten, maybe twenty inside that unkempt resting nest.

Each in turn makes a three-quarter elliptic flight out then back, unhesitant. Maybe one-second’s thought of flight. Small brown mostly body, yet a wide fore to tail bar of white held in private on the earth-side of each wing. A stoke or two of wings and the task of flight is untied, back on a hidden limb.

 
 

neil reid © october 2012

  
comments:
Not a poem. Obvious? Just some ribbon of observations. While the prompt suggested multiple visits to some specific place, work and the season drew more limits than I’d expected. So this is just “something”, or “whatever”, which so ever you choose. While the suggested observation wasn’t suggested to be “about” any one thing in specific, because of what I’ve been reading of late, yes, for me the real focal place was about birds. And yes, there were more birds all about than I would normally notice, most of them being less raucous then what more easily draws attention away.

  
Written for the We Write Poems prompt #127,  take some time to simply observe a natural setting. Read the prompt for more detail if you wish.