I fed out of my hand a flock of keys <br />To clapping of wings and shrill cries in flight. <br />Sleeves up, arms out, on tiptoe I rose; <br />At my elbow I felt the nudging of night. <br />The dark. And the pond, and the wash of waves. <br />And screeching black beaks in their savage attack, <br />All quick for the kill - not to hunger and die, <br />While birds of the species I-love-you fall back. <br /> <br />The pond. And the dark. The pulsating flare <br />From pipkins of pitch in the gloom of midnight, <br />The boat keel nibbled by lapping of waves. <br />And birds at my elbow in their wrath and fight. <br />Night gurgled, washed in the gullets of weirs. <br />And it seemed if the young were unfed, by rote, <br />The hen-birds would kill - before the roulades <br />Would die in the shrilling, the crooked throat.<br /><br />Boris Pasternak<br /><br />http://www.poemhunter.com/poem/improvisation/
