Rubins, A View of Het Steen in the Early Morning
Birds are busybodies, twitching their tails
and flicking their heads like nervous Nellies,
the antithesis of sloths and snails
and barnacles on boats’ underbellies;
here one second, somewhere else the next,
migratory, footloose and fancy free,
tentative as a deconstructed text;
restless as a caged Capuchin monkey,
fickle as a coquette or a housefly,
with the attention span of a gnat,
with no theology or urge to deify
but as inquisitive as a house cat,
with a stork’s wingspread to lift it as high
as a box kite in a buttermilk sky.
Robert Forrey
