Murmuration

Above the marshland, starlings fold themselves into a single thought — ten thousand bodies tracing the edge of what agreement means, no leader, only listening. They pour like smoke reversing, a lung of wings contracting, swelling, drawing shapes that have no name in any cartography of air, then dissolving before the eye can hold them. What law is this, that says the nearest seven neighbors are enough to steer a world? Each bird adjusting not to the whole but to the closest few, and trusting. Dusk thickens. The reeds below stand patient as an audience that knows the performance will not be repeated, that this exact unraveling belongs to now alone. They descend at last, a dark confetti settling into the branches, and the sky empties like a page after the poem has said everything it came to say.