Window pattern in "The Village".The lime tree opposite our house, the other day was crowded with starlings, and seemed to ring like a tree full of telephones. Today other birds have taken up residence. The tree is resonant with different voices. Honks and whistles, clucks and coos and murmurs. The parliament of fowls.
While I am pruning a portion of the hedge, the sky suddenly darkens, becomes leaden, purple. The light remains, but it all seems to come from flowers and leaves in the garden, which seem to glow with an inward light. Soon, very soon it will rain slow, heavy drops.
4 comments:
The parliament of fowls.
Sounds like a Monty Python sketch (probably is). That aside, it's a beautiful observation; I also like how a tree can often be full of birds, but you don't actually see most of them, just hear their distinct voices.
which seem to glow with an inward light.
Eerie and lovely.
Not quite. The Parlement of Foulys is a poem by Geoffrey Chaucer, largely eclipsed by The Caterbury Tales.
Couldn't quite call to mind the colective noun for starlings, so resorted to Brewer (they're under 'nouns of assemblage', rather than 'collective'), and it is, of coures 'a murmuration of starlings'.
Now the problem is tearing myself away from it, when there are such delights to be found as 'a shrewdness of apes', 'a richesse of martens', 'a business of ferrets', 'a congregation of plovers', 'a kindle of kittens'...
An ingenuity of collective nouns!
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