Early morning frost
Wind beneath the raven’s wings
A nice cup of tea.
—
The first drops of rain
Three kites skim the valley floor
Their cries long and thin.
—
In the tall oak
by the chapel door
A gang of jackdaws
telling smutty jokes.
They have no care
for the slow sermons
of crows,
Nor the ponderous theology
of glint-eyed
ravens.
simonhlilly 
nice (I’m undecided as to the proper punctuation to round out my gut feeling of nice…I swerve toward an exclamation point, but they so disappoint. A period is too morose…what to do? I aimed for a simple gut feeling and ended up in this abyss).
Our punctuations evolve, perhaps. I think exclamations have besubtled themselves. No longer shock and surprise! as in “Nice! ( how on earth did you manage that? Something half-readable for a change!)” and more a buoyant approval, as in “Nice! A balloon of pleasure gently wafting upwards before the ultimate deflating perforation of life….”)
Yes, where did it go? The shock and surprise (What! A poem? Delightful!) to which the old books are riddled. It was run away with by over-enthusiastic teenagers (Awesome! Oh my God!? That’s so great!) and so I am left bereft of the mark that will say—hey, that struck a very pleasant chord in me, nicely done. Which is something like your balloon of pleasure wafting upwards before the ultimate deflating perforation of life…hahaha I very much like that!
But, I must add, even an overused punctuation mark is better than those devil-spawn of emoticons….
hm. I have mixed feelings…in the absence of actual prose, the need to indicate tone reaches a crisis point: enter the emoticon. I tend to be of a dying bred that sticks fervently to prose, consequently, I have been told, that my texting communication has poor “syntax” and that I really need to step up my emoticon game…so that people will know how, rather than the pared-down what, of that which I am trying to communicate. In other words: there may be a case to be made for the emoticon. I just wish they weren’t so stupidly ugly and lacking in subtlety…which brings me around to the problem of anti-prose formats like texting, which makes up for a lot by its convenience…..a circle of hell.
This is a good one!
Nature spoke so sweetly through your words.
i’ve read this poem several times, so what keeps drawing me to it? for one, it begins with a couple of haikus, lovely haikus at that. and then it skillfully uses the motif of birds throughout. (this poem is not “for the birds” but is “of the birds.”) and then how it moves into religious imagery. and i enjoy reading aloud “ponderous theology.”
A change of style.