Frozen Hoards

Crusted icing sugar and biting cold winds,
Brought a hungry speckled cousin here,
Surveying from swaying fir branches,
On a fruit reconnaissance.

Our luscious rosy crabapples,
The spoils of pigeon feasts.
A few still budded the boughs
And signalled precious fare.

The blush and grey-capped spy grows brave,
And plucks one in its beak.
On paper-white ground it pecks and feeds,
Before the blackbird cousin charges forth.

Four times this game of intrepid fieldfare,
Back and forth from foe:
The blackbird fiercely defending,
The fieldfare with nowhere else to go.