STURNUS VULGARIS

About the layered air,
  like locusts, starling-kind
wheels in great flocks above the city square:
  quite leaderless, and yet so disciplined
  they seem to share one mind.

Even the dreaming seer
  remembered starling-kind
as numberless and nameless, in his Hell;
  he saw their dustclouds whirling in the wind
  of lust, blown round and round.

My earth-besotted eyes
  and Dante's are combined
in wonderment at many forming one,
  when, instant as the louvers of a blind
  the birds, to no command,
...