NEW MOON IN NOVEMBER
I have been watching the crows and now it is dark
Together they led night into the creaking oaks
Under them I hear the dry leaves walking
That blind man
Gathering their feathers before winter
By the dim road that the wind will take
And the cold
And the note of the trumpet
– W. S. Merwin from his book The Lice (1967), recently published in a 50th Anniversary Edition by Copper Canyon Press. Copyright © 2017 by W. S. Merwin. Used by permission of the publishers, www.coppercanyonpress.org.
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Photo of crows taken by Lucas Policastro and used under Creative Commons Attribution License. The original can be found here.