Few poems manage to be frightening and funny in the space of six lines, but "Flight calls" tries. Its subject is the unseen traffic of the night sky. The title is a birdwatcher's term for the brief calls that migrating birds make as they pass overhead in the dark. That makes it reasonable to read the "things" that "fly over the city at night" as birds, though the poem never names them. This withholding matters. From the street, in the dark, they are only presences, known by sound and by what we imagine.
The first stanza answers that uncertainty with a quick pile-up of metaphors: "dark fire a holy rocket / a cut-throat god." None of them is a comfortable comparison. "Dark fire" is a contradiction, since fire is what lights the dark, and the phrase suggests something burning that we cannot see. "Holy rocket" fuses the sacred with the mechanical, and it catches both the speed of a flying body and the sense of something launched with purpose. Then comes "a cut-throat god," where worship turns to menace. The sequence climbs from element to machine to deity, each step more personal and more dangerous. The missing punctuation leaves the reader to decide whether these are three names for one thing or three separate flashes of the speaker's imagination. That ambiguity keeps the stanza restless.
The second stanza changes register completely. "And the songs of a starling / come to town / for an evening out" sounds like gossip about a neighbour. The idiom "an evening out" belongs to people in their best clothes, heading off to a restaurant or a show. Starlings are very much town birds, and they are famous mimics, so "songs" in the plural fits a bird that borrows many voices. Note too that the songs themselves "come to town," as if the sound could travel without its owner. The effect is comic, but it is not a simple joke at the first stanza's expense. One reading is that the god has been brought down to size. Another, which I would argue the poem allows, is that the awe never leaves. The same night holds both the terrifying vastness overhead and the cheerful chatter of a bird that has made itself at home among streetlights.
The form supports this swing between registers. There is no rhyme, no punctuation and no capital letters, so even "god" is lowercase, which quietly brings the sacred down to street level. The rhythm is loose but patterned. The first stanza runs from a long line of about nine syllables ("things fly over the city at night") to one of about seven, then drops to a blunt four, "a cut-throat god." The hard *k* and *t* sounds in "cut-throat" make that last line land like a closing door. The second stanza follows a similar shrinking, with a seven-syllable line, a tiny three-syllable one ("come to town"), and then a slightly longer, relaxed ending. The sounds also echo gently across the break. "Town" and "out" share a vowel, and "out" also closes on the same consonant as "night," the last word of the poem's opening line. Night begins the poem and "out" ends it, and the pairing hints that the evening out and the night flight are one event seen from two angles.
The poem is significant for how much it does in so little space. It takes a familiar subject, birds crossing a sleeping city, and makes it strange. It also declines to settle on one tone. Many nature poems ask us to be reverent, and many city poems ask us to be wry, but here the sublime and the domestic share a single sentence. It's brief enough to resemble haiku in its compression, though it follows no strict syllable count. What stays with the reader is the suggestion that the sky above a city is busier and stranger than the streets below ever notice, and that the right response might be fear, delight and a sense of humour all at once.