Live Encounters Poetry & Writing August 2025
Starlings, poems by Sharon Fagan McDermott.
Starlings
1.
Starlings love to hang in flocks.
Opera singers of the canopy,
they stop me in my tracks
with their pure, high, fluted notes.
My relationship with them is mixed.
This late spring, I love to watch
the mothers with their fledglings
because it’s always such a loud and lively
conversation. But starlings leave no seed
unturned and crowd the yard and so
the other hungry ones: wrens, sparrows,
robins, cardinals—get short shrift
when starlings come to dine.
2.
Mozart’s beloved pet starling mimicked
his melodies and sang them back to him
with variations and embellishments enough
to inspire and push the composer further.
His bird became a muse on loop, the bond
between them thrived, lasting three years.
And when the starling died, Mozart
threw the bird a lavish funeral with mourners,
hymns, and poems. As he inscribed
his grief upon the starling’s tiny gravestone.
3.
Tonight, before the Strawberry Moon
begins its rise, I watch a starling posed
and poised upon my planter of zinnia’s
and wish that The Night Queen’s aria
from Mozart’s “Magic Flute”
might spill from its bright yellow
beak like gold coins rained
down into fountains–
4.
–or that the flock of starlings nattering
dusk into being—from my maple tree
might take to sky all at once—swooping,
diving and form a murmuration so voluble
as to write new songs for our angry,
battered world. To teach us, once
again, how to look up and learn the
black notes of the winged wild:
their score against the waning light.
Patti Smith Speaks of Dylan Thomas
and of the fisherman in his poem
with the “long-legged heart,”
and of tonight’s Flower Moon that blooms
like my peonies, petaled wide and white
as sails on a windy sea, and I suddenly want
to dance in my night yard like the woman
in Dylan Thomas’ poem whom he calls
“mad as birds,” so now I add to my list
of goals—yes!—let me be “mad as birds,”
because right now I hear a Tennessee Warbler
calling from my neighbor’s pine. His notes
cut through the noisy Pittsburgh morning
and make it whole and full as a Thursday
moon. And my hero, Patti Smith, is mad in love
with poetry. She reads from Dylan’ Thomas
book with its threadbare binding with such
delight. And though I was sure I was ready
for sleep, this magic coalesces in my ear,
and I rise up—now a bird singing in a copse
of shadowed pines, waking the dear warblers
who are migrating through—with the moon,
a steadfast bloom, in my hand.
© Sharon Fagan McDermott
Sharon Fagan McDermott is a poet, essayist, and teacher who lives with her dog Beowulf in Pittsburgh, PA. She has published four collections of poetry, most recently Life Without Furniture (Jacar Press, 2018). Her first collection of essays, Millions of Suns: On Writing and Life, co-written with M.C. Benner Dixon was published in 2023 by the University of Michigan Press. “Poets and Writers Magazine” named this collection of essays and writing prompts one of its “Best Books for Writers.”