Sky Writing in Long Symmetrical Lines

Geese / Standard V Flight Formation

Geese Too Many to Number

James Hart

Sometimes destiny

writes itself in long sentences across the sky,

migration’s clustered alphabets

forming

            scattered

                        words I begin

                                    to understand, yet

have no tongue

to speak the syntax of distant wings

diagraming gray clouds’ grammar,

the chill

            of late

                        winter air still

                                    a skillful murmur

I also comprehend

as, open-mouthed, I stand

looking up in muted awe

at couplets

            slipping

                        into quatrains

                                    of sky and poetry,

nature’s black diction rhyming one immutable law

scripted

            there in lines

                        of shifting

                                    symmetry.

(Poem from unpublished manuscript

entitled Somewhere West of Never)