They crouch beneath the eaves, bright proud glances and power full grown
They claw their way out through cracks in the flint and the stone of the walls. Emerge slowly, heavy lidded and weary as from a womb, their taloned limbs still to grow into the promise of their massive heads.
They mourn their sunlit exile from the river’s dark waters, their reduction to mere channels and spouts and perches for pigeons
And there is madness, tucked into cornered arrays of angles and planes and nothing means anything but the torrent of water that rushes through its vessel paying no mind to the vacant staring eyes
Endlessly, violently relieved of the weight of memory and ages by the mighty rushing of waters, relieved even of the precise crags of their own face.
The pigeons remain unafraid.