I didn't know what they were at first,
stopped counting at fifteen.
Gnarled and bowed their bodies,
contorted vicious remnants,
they brought to mind the
twisted corpses of war
Many speckled bodies,
talon-stiff, turned statuesque
by a poultice of algal gel and salt.
In each pricked tuft of seaweed,
two, maybe three birds, lay defeated.
A remorseless frost.
Just arrived, confused by an untimely freeze,
they headed for south again,
struck down by a famine of warm.
Today, feathers flicker from stuck pats,
months old now
waving a monument
to the winter
that swallowed starlings.
Sonja Broderick
http://www.poemhunter.com/poem/frosted-monuments/
