Storks

 
Storks in Avila First Flight This young stork, walking his stone plank, the sudden drop at tower’s end, hurling him down to fall like a stone, his destiny to float on air, to open his waiting wings, to soar, staring at the sun, eyeball to eyeball, the city a map beneath his extended feet, its walled circuit, a tumble down of towers, with crowded squares, the town folk tiny, beetles these carapaced cars with their clamouring klaxons and people clawing upwards assaulting the skies where the gods still live, listening to man’s inarticulate, earthbound cries. 2. Evening Storks Suddenly, the storks: spiralling on rising air, their wings spread like black and white paper kites. Necks stretch longingly forward, legs trail behind, long beaks point towards church tower nests, wildernesses of twig and branch, awry, like heads of hair that have long forgotten the shears’ tweak in barber’s shop. First one, then another, as distant specks grow into storks, more storks: the colony gathering in late reunion. Soon they will fly. Then will come snow, dark days, and eventually, spring’s cyclical renewal: storks sparking white light and summer returned. Stork Talk If this stork could talk would it tell of babies swaddled in cotton, brought crying from the south to adorn the cribs of burghers and peasants standing below the cathedral with its stork perch high above? Or would it tell the tale of the tile in the tourist shop:
“Don’t believe in stupid storks: go out and get pregnant!” The world is changing and has changed. Storks ranging over once open fields see a crimson tide of brick raging against the city’s walls. Castille’s interior sea, indeed,: but the sea has suffered a sea change, turning from green and gold to red, banded with broad black tarmac threads tying down the countryside. Storks now gather at garbage dumps and their former hunting grounds are stalked by bulldozers, cement mixers, and long-necked metal cranes. Storks: so hard to capture, at a distance, in flight ... 4. More Stork Talk Stork: a white star standing above his shoulder and he grows bolder with that shimmer of light, silhouetted against a setting sky, and I know what he knows: that nothing below is worth worrying about, because the real truth is up there, with him, atop the cathedral tower, close to sun, moon, and stars, where people and traffic and rumours of war are just that -- rumours, and nothing more; what can he care, castled in his frailness of light and air, about sad, mad stories of rights and wrongs taken out and paraded below the dignity of his gaze. Wild flights of pigeons scatter before the sparrow-hawk’s scything wing. Immutable storks stand eternal, like stone bulls, locked into inner landscapes of space and time.