This soaring murmuration—

thousands of starlings 
drawing with their bodies 

shifting shapes in the sky, 
becoming for a moment 

a giant, swooping bird, 
reflecting in the lake, 

bending towards the shore, 
stretching over the trees, 

dissolving in the dusk. 

—After a photograph by James Crombie, Starling murmuration over Lough Ennell, and a video by Colin Hogg, both of which were published in The Irish Times on 4 March 2021

Starling Murmuration Over Lough Ennell (photograph)
County Westmeath, Ireland; 3 March 2021

Copyrighted © 2021 by INPHO/James Crombie.
Reproduced here with permission from the photographer.

James Crombie

is a senior photographer at Inpho Sports Photography, who joined the agency in 2006 as winner of the No Experience Required TV program broadcast on RTÉ (radio television network in Ireland). In January 2021, the Press Photographers Association of Ireland awarded Crombie the title of Press Photographer of the Year for his portfolio of striking sports-related images throughout 2020.

Gary S. Rosin’s

poetry and haiga have appeared, or are forthcoming, in various literary and poetry magazines such as Concho River Review, Failed Haiku, Harbinger Asylum, KYSO Flash, MacQueen’s Quinterly, Poetry24, The Legal Studies Forum, and Visions International; as well as in several anthologies, including Faery Footprints (Fae Corp Publishing), Lifting the Sky: Southwestern Haiku & Haiga (Dos Gatos Press), Texas Poetry Calendar (Kallisto Gaia Press), Untameable City: Poems on the Nature of Houston (Mutabilis Press), and elsewhere.

His poem “Viewing the Dead” was nominated for a Pushcart Prize. Two of his poems appear in Silent Waters, photographs by George Digalakis (Athens, 2017). He is the author of two chapbooks, Standing Inside the Web (Bear House Publishing, 1990) and Fire and Shadows (Legal Studies Forum, 2008) (offprint).

Selections of Gary’s poetry and photography can be found at his website, 4P Creations: http://4pcreations.com