When did they become city birds?

Poems about some loud neighbors

Photo by Kasturi Roy on Unsplash

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Who knows why they keep flapping into my poems, when there are so many lovelier, more melodious creatures to pay attention to. Here they are, though; and if I’m going to write about someone glossy and loud, I’d rather it was a bird than a human.

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STREET CROWS                                                 2012


When did they become city birds?
When did they leave the cornfields
of Nebraska, of Van Gogh,
and come flapping west?

     Naw.
     Raw.

In ones and threes
they slice through morning fog,
blunt obsidian axe-blades balanced teetering
on billboards, gables, bus shelters, curbs.

     Jaw.
     Draw.

Gulls and pigeons glance at us just enough
to keep a safety zone intact; crows stare,
ancient alien eyes as sharp
as their grinning beaks.

     Baw.
     Law.

Sparrows and blackbirds call to each other;  
crows hail us too, and comment, in tones
of gleeful irony, like fashion critics
or prophets of apocalypse.

     Faw.
     Pshaw.

All city birds want our food; crows want
to eat the space between us, jab
the seed-corn of our city lives from hearts
and sidewalks, and flap away glutted.

     Maw.
     Claw.

     Craw.

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LANGUAGE LEARNING                                                2026


I hear crows call to one another,
from roof and powerline and sidewalk, up 
and down the city block. They call again
and I call back, tighten my throat to mimic 
the strangled consonant, the raspy vowel,
the pitch and rhythm of their conversation.
Cgaw, I offer to the sky. Cgaw, cgaw.
They pause as if to listen, humoring me,
then call again, shake out their wings while waiting
for answers in the accent that they know.

The other day I passed three crows afoot,
beaks tilted each toward other, in the weeds
under a slender sidewalk-tree. And Cgaw
I said under my breath in passing, not inclined
to shout. No answer. No one flapped away.

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Now that I have these poems on the same page, I realize how focused both of them are on the voices of crows — so harsh, so distinctive, so tempting to interpret as speech. Dawn to dusk, even in the city, all sorts of birds twitter to one another; crows, more than others, sound as if they’re carrying on a conversation. A loud conversation, the kind you can hear from one end of the block to the other, the kind it’s really tempting sometimes to join in on, if only to see whether these rowdy neighbors will lower their voices once they realize someone’s been listening or whether they’ll simply include you in the shouting match.

So yes, I talk to crows on my street. Don’t tell me you’re surprised. Please do tell me if you do it too, or something similar.