their nest, their young, in the hollows of broken concrete

This is from Poetry Daily. I enjoyed reading this poem, the construction of it and the way the writer took the familiar, the birds everyone loves to hate, and made a poem out of it.

The Messenger

I

On the way to visit a physician,
a friend, who would soon suddenly die,
I saw a pigeon on a heap of rubble
standing more like a gull,
other pigeons in wild flight
searching the wreckage
of two Times Square theaters,
razed to build a hotel.
They were looking for their roof,
their nest, their young,
in the hollows of broken concrete,
in the pink and white dust,
they fluttered around the wrecking ball
that still worked the façade,
the cornice of cement Venetian masks.

2

I'll be no messenger for pigeons.
I can not help but see
how like their markings—
the yellow, red and blue dots
that speckle the trout and butterfly.
The roof, a giant bird of tar paper,
takes its last breaths on the broken stage.
There are no tragic pigeons.
I mourn my sweet friend
fallen among the young,
unable to sustain flight,
part of the terrible flock,
the endless migration
of the unjustly dead.

3

When I was a child, before I knew the word for love
or snowstorm, before I remember a tree or a field,
I saw a white bird in a blizzard, huddled in snow
and ice on our kitchen window sill.
My first clear memory of terror.

4

This winter I hung a gray and white stuffed
felt seagull from the ring of my window shade,
a reminder of good times by the sea,
of Chekhov and impossible love.
It pleased me the gull
sometimes lifted a wing in the drafty room.
Once when looking at the gull I saw
through the window a living seagull glide
toward me then disappear—what a rush of life!
I remember its hereness, while in the room
the senseless symbol, little more than a bedroom slipper,
dangled on a string.

5

My childhood hangs like a gull in the distant sky.
Its eyes behind mud and salt
see some dark thing below:
on a trawler off Montauk
I am heading home cleaning my catch,
seagulls dive close, desperate for the guts.
A little above the Atlantic we race toward port,
their different struggling faces inches from mine.
I feed, they take. I feed, they take.
For a few minutes I am part of the flock.

Stanley Moss