"Blackbirds" for My Father

This is a recent picture of my father and me taken during my visit in Alabama. Below is a poem written in his honor and published in the inaugural issue of _Poemeleon_, an online journal of poetry edited by Cati Porter. Click on the above title "Blackbirds" to visit _Poemeleon_.

Blackbirds

Like a canopy of darkness
they shadow the ground for miles
on currents that lift them
back to their roosts.

Years later I ask my father
if he gathered us
to watch thousands
swoop down on trees
sit wing to wing
until morning branches cracked
under their weight.

At daybreak did they leave the oaks
bare?

He says we never saw them abandon the hollow
catch a new wind to an unharvested south

but often would pile into the car to see their return
black streaks on the upward drift
of a September afternoon.


Chella Courington
June 2006