The Crows Converge on All the Trees Around Our New Old House -Svea Barrett

It started the evening after one of our new neighbors,
we don’t know which, called 911, “suspicious person,”
on my son’s girlfriend as she dared to walk and hold
 
a phone in front of our house while being black. Not
a murder. A conference, a convention, no, a congress,
a conclave, a convocation of crows. They descend
 
every night now since that night, all around us, just before
the dark. They circle, settle, circle, settle, chatter, cry, caw,
scold, scatter and regather, so many they re-leaf the street’s
 
huge empty oaks with brilliant blackness. First 20, 25, then
50, then 100, 50 more. They're gone before the dawn.
The smallest of our cats watches this with me, bottle-brush-
 
tailed, spike-spined, silent hisses. Birds, she thinks, are prey,
but these black clouds of crow could kill her. Our older cat,
the black one, she’s just fine, feels safe here in our cozy
 
container of a cottage.        Nothing can contain these crows.
Me? I love a crow. Proud crone myself, I feel their power. 
And on their chosen settling trees, slightly different ones each
 
night, in front of us, the sides, in back, they circle and protect us
with that power. They're black relief against too much stark, pale
sky, against too many stark white houses, too much snow, always
 
snow, every day more pale ceramic snow. The crows don’t fear the guns
inside my upstate neighbors’ homes. No one can clear their brilliant
blackness from the trees so close to where we all must live and breathe.



Svea Barrett’s poems have appeared in The Comstock Review, The Paterson Literary Review, Lips, Griffel, The Rat’s Ass Review, Molecule, and others. She tied for first place in the Allen Ginsberg Poetry contest in 2013, and was a finalist in the Laura Boss Narrative Poetry Book Contest in 2022.