The Coming Of The Corvids

What calls them hither, these feather-clad warriors,
These ebon-swathed guardians of crepuscular sky?
What drives them together in the Norfolk dusk,
A yearning, an instinct, a reason to fly?

They gather and they chatter
They assemble and they clatter
Cacophonous corvids, jackanape jackdaws
They start as just a smatter
Swell to a seething mass of matter
Waiting and watching for a single cause.

They perch on lofty wires
They fill canopies and nooks.
They are waiting for the sunset
They are waiting for the rooks.

Blood-orange sun now bows its head,
Skyline kissed and ruddied.
Dusk infuses, deepening red,
Fields and foliage bloodied.

To a crescendo, the avian chorus
Fills the Anglian evenscape
As the horizon pushes close.
Deep and relentless, the coming night
The obdurate failure of the light
A black mass held by crows.

The rooks are here!  The strident caws
Mingle with the ambient roars,
They swoop and dive, blending in the gloaming
Connect and join, mixing in their roaming,
A trembling stack of beaks and claws.

And now they rise, the corvid chorus
Swarming, blotting the indigo sky
The nocturne quakes with their communal roar
A rumble penetrates to the core
Thousands lift, and together fly.

A boiling carpet, a feathered block
Our upturned faces in awe and shock
The jackdaws joke and the dark rooks mock
As we gape below this colossal flock.
They swing, they sway, they murmurate,
They dip, they soar, they susurrate
Their instincts and their needs to sate
A heirarchy to equate.

They shrink, contract, descend en masse
Upon a clump of trees.
They jostle and they tussle
They wriggle and they bustle
They whisper and they rustle
They grow quiet in the breeze.
Settling for the night,
A few rogues left in flight
One lonely 'caw! caw! caw!'
And the corvids call no more.

The night grows deep
Now the corvids sleep
The stars, tentative, emerge.
A distant tawny's plaintive cry
Cuts into this Anglian sky
Where the rooks and the jackdaws surge.

We sleep ourselves under Swaffham's sky
Where the beech and the bramble grows.
Having seen the flight, at the onset of night
Where the army of corvids rose.

What calls them hither, these feather-clad warriors,
These ebon-swathed guardians of crepuscular sky?
What draws them together in the Norfolk dusk,
A yearning, an instinct, a reason to fly?