A burned-out church, a flock of starlings, a farmer with a gun: the poem sets up a small scene, then slowly lets it grow into something stranger and larger. Nothing in the text tells us where this church stands or what happened to it, so it is best to read the ruin as the poem presents it: a building "charred black" with fireweed growing "purple" through the wreckage. Fireweed is a plant that colonises burned ground, so even the colour in the first stanza belongs to nature's takeover. The birds are not intruders here. They are heirs.
The poem's central idea is the collision between human ownership and a nature that simply does not recognise it. The starlings are "well-fed," and the farmer is the one counting losses, since he eyes his "profitable fruit" and tallies "unrecoverable loot." Salomon's word choice is sharp. The birds are thieves in his accounting, "the spoil of thieves," but they behave with a confidence no thief could manage, shouting from the rafters of a place no one guards any longer. The farmer's economic logic, in which everything is either profit or loss, meets creatures that live entirely outside it.
The poem's sound world carries much of its meaning. The birds speak in "jargon," a word that suggests both meaningless noise and a private, specialised language. Their cry is "an off-key scream," "obstreperous," and the harsh consonants of that word seem to perform the racket they describe. The acoustics matter too: the noise is "loudest in the wooden arch," then echoes "in the empty pews," where the sound fills the space the congregation has left behind. Those "whirrs" do not "perish" in the silence but bounce off the benches, so the church, silent as a building, is full of life as a resonating chamber.
The most unsettling image comes when the poet remembers the people. The "parishioners / Lie stiff in Sunday clothes," so they are dead and still dressed for worship, and the poem never explains how they came to be there. This is the quiet centre of the piece, and it changes the farmer's later action. When he fires into the flock, the poem calls it profaning "the monstrous service." The adjective is surprising. A service is something sacred, but "monstrous" suggests something swollen and wrong. One reading is that the shooting is the desecration, a second death in a place already full of the dead. Another is that the whole scene, the bodies and the clamour and the gunfire, forms a grotesque parody of worship. The poem leaves both possibilities open.
Structurally, Salomon uses short, rhymed quatrains with lines that alternate in length, giving the poem a tidy, almost nursery-like frame that sits oddly against its grim content. The rhymes are often loose or slant ("church" and "purple," "Sunday clothes" echoing "pews" only faintly), so the pattern keeps threatening to settle and then slipping. That small instability suits a poem about order breaking down. The farmer's shot even disturbs the verse itself: "unnerve his / Equilibrium" breaks across a line, the sentence stumbling just as the man does.
The ending is the poem's sharpest move. The birds "fly off in pairs, and turn / In perfect echelon," a military word for a staggered formation. After the farmer's disordered shot, the starlings display discipline and grace. Then comes the closing cry, "Begone! Begone! Begone!" The line is ambiguous in a way that rewards rereading. It could be the birds telling the farmer to leave, or the poem telling us, or the voice of time itself dismissing human claims on the place. Whichever we choose, the triple repetition has the finality of a bell tolling. Even the bell, one might say, has been replaced by birds.
What makes the poem memorable is this reversal of authority. The church once taught that creation was given to people to keep; here the congregation is silent, the building is a shell, and the "service" is held by animals. The farmer, armed and aggrieved, is the one who looks small, while the birds, noisy and unbothered, get the last word.