There are fireworks out my window again. The past couple nights ive caught the display.
I don’t know what they are from, but I can just see them, far to the right, only a little bit blocked by a building some streets away.
They are wonderfully colored—subtle hues somehow—and go on for a suprising length of time.
My favorites are a certain kind of very very large white chrysthanemum ones, that have starry trails on the inside and light up everythin around.
Tonight there was something even more striking though. A fluttering of wings below the window. The cyclic migration of dark shapes. Many, dark, flapping, shapes. From the roof next door, over the trees, past the windows here, and back to alight on neighboring building-tops.
Ravens.
A swarm of them—or an unkindness, as it’s called.
They cry in a way that makes me think they must be joking; making a parody of themselves.
Their bodies look so heavy, but they whirl around in their multitude and I stare down at them—and up at them and sideways as they circle—transfixed.
Whatever are they doing? What are these mesmerizing movements? What could they be plotting? To be soaring and gyrating so aimlessly and so intentionally?
They take a few more turns and then somehow disappear. A momentary distraction by a firework explosion and, suddenly, the birds have vanished into night.
Marigolds and mums are still blooming burning blue above Berlin, but the night is cold, so I close the window.
