Grackles were new to me when I moved to Texas, the typical pest birds of southern cities. Being from Seattle, the closest analogy to Grackles’ part in the urban ecosystem would be crows, or seagulls, but Grackles are louder, and more of them speak at once. In large parking lots, you may see and hear several hundred at once, swooping and crying and wailing, in a way that sounds genuinely magnificent – and they are the only animals who can and do overpower the manmade sounds of the city.

“Concrete” is an ode and a dirge from the polluted, cement-filled part of Austin I live in. There isn’t much connecting me to nature when I walk to the grocery store and back, but there are thousands of Grackles.

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