Starling Wings

Starling Wings

 

My faith exposed and naked stood

Beneath the leering sky

 

The lake I loved spread like a ghost

That seeks a place to die

 

I did not see the starlings till

They rose in front of me

 

In fitful, loud, chaotic flight,

They all at once did flee

 

So startled from my inward gloom,

My outward form did shake,

 

And as I trembled in surmise,

My spirit came awake!

 

So rose a wrath of starling wings[1]

And then, a wind that spurned

 

My dirges in a time of self, [2]

As fear of God returned.

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[1] Paris believed that God is like a worldly-wise lover who does not trust us and demands our respect. Her stick is equivalent in size to a reward she is reluctant to offer. If you do not fear her disapproval, she concludes that you do not love her because fear is an essential part of respect, and respect is a necessary condition of love. Indeed, if you do not fear the consequences of bad behavior as it relates to her, you reduce her to the status of a fool, and she will every time decline to be your b***h.

 

[2] The renowned psychoanalyst William Glasser believed that a person does not do crazy things because he is mentally ill but is mentally ill because he does crazy things. He believed that the emphasis should be placed on the behavior, not the diagnosis. In “The Wrath of Starling Wings,” the poet’s act of gloom made him the dirge that he was. The rise of the starlings changed his behavior, and he became something better than the gloom he engendered.