As The Crow Clawed The Earth Poem by Graham Stone

On distant and beleaguered horizon flocked a solemn crow,
Silhouetted against the dank and beaten blue bars of sky,
A frantic haste abetting its flustered and frustrating flap of feathered wings,
That stirred the icy air in sickening gusts about its shivering carcass,
Its beady eye dancing desperately across the frozen damp earth.
In spiralling ragged circles it swoops and glides,
Urgently scanning the lay beneath its span of wings, feathers and claws,
A glint it spies in that bleary lack of light, and at last it dives,
Falling and blundering to the ground, toward a sheet of littered foil.
Upon the earth the bird bounds and hops toward its useless quarry,
Claws clasping at sods of cold black soil as it skims across the land.
It lets a low long caw of triumph escape its iron beak
Before pecking the discarded foil wrapper
And hauling it from its forgotten squally;
A treasure to this simple species of which it cannot believe its luck.
Once more the black wings flap with a sick and frantic haste,
Wrenching itself from the frozen, sodden dirt,
And bursting again into ragged flight against the frugal dusk-sky.