Shift

This morning, quiet and humid,
an invasion of stealthy, marauding
blackbirds, hundreds and probably more,
their white shit on the black car's roof,
and a green grasshopper standing stock
still, sweating the birds, which have now adjusted to my presence
with occasional low barks of warning
they tumble from the still-green leaves, a migration shaping up,
twenty miles later you exit the car finding the grasshopper
still there, at eye level now, a tenacious fellow - so you nod
then later still, after work, walking through the broken city
the setting sun illuminates three gold crosses
high above three people who are making an effort to hold
an indifferent bus for a bent-low woman,
and it feels for a minute like it's all happening just the way it has to.