Murmuration Poem by John Beaton

I've often marveled at bird flocks performing aerobatics. On a few occasions, I've seen a phenomenon in which flocks of starlings combine to form a super-flock and make kaleidoscopic patterns on the sky. Such a formation has a beautiful name. I've used it as title of this poem, which is my attempt to capture its kinetics.

The poem has twelve five-beat (pentameter)and three-beat (trimeter)lines that intertwine to give it irregular movement. Similarly, the rhymes form an uneven pattern, but they're all there: three pairs (smoke/cloak, sky/fly, and explodes/implodes)and two trios (condense/recompense/sense and bespatter/scatter/matter) .

It's all one sentence and it won first prize in the 2012 Able Muse Write Prize for poetry. The judge commented that it was "entirely mimetic of the swoops and turns of a flock." It's been subsequently published in "Eyes on BC" and "Better Than Starbucks."

You can see a fine video of one of these events by Googling "River Shannon murmuration".