Anger in Motion

by Emily Smith

 

“Anger still in motion.”

 

​

It was the year West Nile Virus spread

Further south than ever before, yet all

I feared that August was the starlings.

 

Flocks of thousands settling in fallow fields

As the mist steamed off the moribund earth,

The roads warped from the pressure of cold nights

Meeting a seven year drought;

 

 

The locusts humming beneath the ground,

Ready to burst forth. But the starlings

 

 

Simply hobbled along the cracked dirt

Or above down telephone wires on my periphery

Until they’d rush upwards

 

—Thousands of them,

All at once, horrible storm clouds that never burst—

 

Turning sharply with the taste of weak sea breezes,

From the Chesapeake,

Until they’d pass over your head

 

Only to settle again among empty fields

In the dying afterimage of dawn.