Hunt Club
       

They'd bought Canadian goslings,
chicks to raise as decoys, but when
live-bird lures became unlawful,
the sportsmen termed them feral,
not domestic, stopped their feed
and left them to forage local farms.

Surviving birds, elderless, unled
from incubated hatchling days,
came with autumn to know their
untamed blood in its surpassing
urge to seek in height what wing
to follow, so that soon among
the hard-frost dawns their army headed off.
only to return the same forenoon;
next day too returned them early.

Thus their pattern, wedged in flight
as in fixation, sometimes even
three of these unmigrations rounded
in a day, their cleaving quest for years
not piercing more than county skies,
a wild goose chase flying from, then
choosing only all that it had always known

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Copyright © 2020 Stephen Malin All rights reserved
from Underlight
Word Poetry
Reprinted by Verse Daily® with permission