Fieldfares

A flock of fieldfares

seeks fleeting sanctuary.

Convening in my bared copper beech,

eluding their icy Nordic scrub.

Oscillating between two root worlds.

Thronging winter thrushes,

fused and transitory, frighteningly tight-knit

in a migrant's fragile liminal space.

Gathered like odd upright nuts.

Slick backs of deep chestnut brown

           glimmer in the half-light.

Turdus pilaris

An eerie exotic mutation

whose temporary inundation

carries a fierce alien energy,

           new vicissitudes,

disturbing high-strung natives

who only vaguely remember past assembly,

weird utterances, and queer habits.

Spooked by these strange sparkling deviants

wood pigeons blunder in panic,

crashing through outer boughs.

Only the ever-bright jackdaws,

foresaw and fled.

Magpies and collard doves

abandon the beech,

now the makeshift redoubt of this journeying horde.

A silent jay is stoically unbending,

military bearing,

trying in vain to mimic the hubbub.

Momentary aberrations flicker and flutter

in this fleetingly unstabilised system.

These fugitive marauders are part of

           a greater ecology.

Diversity beyond our little tight territory

and shuttered shores.

Adapted to the foreign scraps.

Modified tastes filling gaps.

Opportunist raiders.

Unsparingly this mob has gorged ad-hoc

on leftovers not to the taste of the denizens,

leaving a wintry barren aspect.

All fiery shades eaten out of eyeshot.

Deep-ruby pyracantha berries stripped.

Hollies holding no hint of reddish-yellow,

their ripe fruit raided.

A crab-apple tree stands strangely stark,

its bitter offering

           all devoured.

A warlike calling: “schack-schack-schack”

slices the frigid air at dusk.

Eccentric evolutionary pitches,

adapted puzzling patterns.

Unfathomable babble and chatter

emanating covert secrets

known unto this passing pack alone.

Late litanies recount the day’s events,

migratory myths and homeland reverie.

Service to their quirky order.

Furious pandemonium

until silenced. . .

           utterly

                       by darkness.

Tonight a cold-front and biting easterlies

pinch these shivering, evanescent, refugees

ever farther south

on their longitudinal magnetic arcs,

lured by fresher Iberian bounty,

prior ports of old comfort

           and asylums unknown.

So, tomorrow. . .

           they move on.