All that year
I had longed for fall,
cooler days, longer nights,
the upstate’s surge into color
and leaf drop until all the deciduous
trees were bare, migratory flocks
bound for some other where
swirling occasionally in their journey,
calling out in tongues I would
never know until walking one day
in the late afternoon, I heard
a soft scrub and rush that could
have been a cloth dusting
a barn wood table, and some hint
of a knitter cabling a sleeve or ribbing
a waist, and there I was, outside,
in the warm slant of low sun, almost
where I wanted to be, by the bare
and beautiful sweet gum at the end
of my street where a whole flock
of starlings, voiceless for once, were
knitting and purling themselves
to each branch, the softest brushing
of feather on wood the only thing
that I could hear, the gleam 
of their feathers all 
I could see.

© by Phebe Davidson.
Used here with the author’s permission.