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They were starlings by Acie Clark

By T.

10 January 2026

804

They were starlings
Acie Clark

On my way back from Alabama, the birds were on their way wherever.
Their bodies, so many strewn in long lines across the sky, looked like
the words I wrote as a child before I knew how to write words.
I thought my thoughts would simply announce themselves to the page
if I pressed my pencil to it. And still, as I write this poem, I’m waiting
to see what I’m going to tell myself. The birds landed in an empty
field, gleaning for whatever it was they’d find. The clouds, so whipped
by wind, turned the sky a milky blue, pouring down fast and thick as paint
as I drove under it. There is so much missing in the world I try to write about:
I don’t know what kind of birds or what had been planted or what to call
a cloud that does that. I’d like to say I don’t need to know to love them,
but why else did I spend a lifetime looking for my name? I promise myself
I will look into it later so for now I look at their bodies, try to remember.
For now, a correction: the field was not an empty field. It was so full of birds.

KEEP READING

SHARED WITH GRATITUDE

This poem appeared in The Hopper, Fall 2024.

ABOUT ACIE CLARK

Acie Clark is a multi-genre writer from Florida and Georgia. He received his MFA from the University of Alabama where he worked for Black Warrior Review as the online editor and as a farmhand at Snows Bend Farm. A former poetry fellow at the Fine Arts Work Center in Provincetown, he currently teaches in the Film, Theatre, and Creative Writing department at the University of Central Arkansas and as a Creative Nonfiction Instructor at Interlochen Center for the Arts. His first… (more)