From Where I Sit: Music and Movement
A small flock of unidentified birds
flies into the skeleton trees
and disappears.
What magic is this?
Smoke from the boiler-house chimney,
at the mercy of the fickle wind,
blows this way and that, confused
unstopping, white, following the music
of Mozart's violins: moving, then still
- a crescendo starts to build -
- falls away to keen -
- a lull -
Small birds flit.
I don't know what type they are.
The cat sits unperturbed in the window,
too old to bother today.
He hates the wind, it ruffles his fur.
The omnipresent hammering of the roofers above,
like a broken metronome behind the strings,
strings that talk, back and forth,
like genteel historic ladies at tea, or
desperate lovers whispering, cajoling, clinging.
Serendipitously the violins mimic those ungainly hammers,
in pizzicato, before building their high strung passion, only
to slide into despair, soaring and dipping
like the birds of the air.
Monica Winter
Sun 5th Jun 2016 20:02
Thank you, Steve. It's actually a true image. I can see the boiler house chimney of a big house from my study window and there are often birds flitting to and fro. The favourites right now are the visiting swallows.
The day I wrote the poem I had a Mozart concerto playing in the background and a bunch of roofers above :/ which were kind of irritating, but 'asking' to be included in my work.