A murmur of Crows

My windscreen is a frame
On the fields, farms and pastures
On the billboards, brickwalls and cooling towers
Unfolding around me as I drive
Around this rolling land,
Passing at times as a blur
At others more sedately, an oasis
Of calm, an eddy swirling behind a rock
In the bubbling rapids of traffic.
Once, in the Fens, a pasture of starlings
Startled up all around me
Like flies off a mid Summer beck
Like dust springing off a taut beat drum
Four and twenty hundred at least
At a bend in the road in the village of Twenty;
And this last week, out from a candyfloss of Winter oaks
Arose an entanglement of Crows
Not a flock, nor a family, not a throng nor a mob
But 200, 400 maybe 1000 sooty corvids
Dancing together, bombing harmoniously
Agitating like pinballs yet
With grace, and beauty, with a pure white heart
With silent intent, a noiselessness
So unexpected from their crocking calls
They skittled off one another,
This murmur of Crows,
Until all that was left was a memory
Receding with the miles
In my dirt-smeared mirror.