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swifts

SICKLES

By David SelzerJune 11, 20260 Comments1 min read208 views

Fleetingly across the lawn a swift’s shadow

falls. I look up. In the blue mid-summer

mid-morning is the moon, a hazy crescent.

Swifts race, with their brief whistles, over the house.

The already heavy air is cut

momentarily by their wings – and then

they are gone into the ancient azure.

Beneath the plum tree, among seeds scattered

from the bird feeders, are barley, wheat, rye.

They took root, and now are green and tall –

wild grasses tamed with stone sickles ten

thousand years ago. We will harvest them with

curve bladed secateurs.

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By David Selzer

DULCE DOMUM

By David SelzerFebruary 29, 20240 Comments1 min read1.8K views

Built well before the Mahdi sacked Khartoum,

like a ledger or the Church of England

our house is square, accommodating. Swifts,

each May, pronounce their southern benison

on ashlar cornerstones and dead masons…

A butterfly, lost in the wintry cellar,

seems closed as death but wings part knowingly.

O peacock eyes, how you seduce from purpose

and time! Imperial birds cry harshly

in paper gardens…

At dusk, in indigo,

swifts dissolve. The house is white, seems solid

as a steamship. Darwin and Marx sent more

than smoke up the funnel.

Note: The poem was originally published on the website in May 2010.

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By David Selzer

FROM A BALCONY

By David SelzerAugust 26, 20213 Comments1 min read2K views

A flock of goosanders fishes in the Straits,

as ubiquitous oyster catchers whistle

on the shore. In the early evening

the air about our balcony throngs

with birds – swallows whispering, swifts screeching,

two ring-necked doves cooing in the clematis,

and a small flock of sparrows chattering

below – as the last sun shades the mountains

opposite. By night three fishermen

make their profaning way along the pier

with swaying torches. The seeming darkness

above the peaks is thronged with unnamed stars

we cannot see, and their imagined,

and fabled harmonies.

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By David Selzer

NEXT YEAR

By David SelzerAugust 26, 20210 Comments1 min read1.3K views

Wild bees have occupied the swifts’ nesting box

sparrows colonised last spring and summer.

The sun casts fleeting, waltzing shadows

on the white walls of the house – males and queens

at their love-making. A carrion crow

with a chunk of bread in its machined beak

alights on the rim of the bird bath

as if from some dark play. It dunks the bread.

Over in the west the sky is ivory

through a break in the clouds. A box, and a bath,

concrete and wood, and the sun – how the future

is made: next year swifts maybe, and the wild bees,

the carrion crow, us.

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By David Selzer

SWIFTS

By David SelzerMay 25, 20143 Comments1 min read2K views

This morning apple blossom, scattered by

the softest of winds, showered me like

confetti and, by chance, I looked up

into a deep, deep cobalt sky and there

they were – one, two then a third and fourth –

arriving perennially at this time

here each May. Monogamous, returning

to the same nests until they die, each

generation nesting in the empty nests –

each generation now, as it returns yearly

from the tropics, finding more and more nests

gone as buildings are renovated

and new ones built sealed as airless boxes.

Aerobatic harbingers of summer

then autumn, once flocking our suburban sky,

are becoming presagers of dearth.

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By David Selzer

LANDFALL

By David SelzerFebruary 28, 20120 Comments1 min read1.7K views

i

When swifts no longer sickle the twilight

and gulls beat inland, when clouds pass like

drift ice and a reaper’s moon is rising

like a blooded eye, leaves spiral almost

like tears. In the unlit house, a voice murmurs.

ii

At flood tide, winds off the waters abuse

the cherry tree and batter the fences.

Just out of hearing, the rolling fathoms calm

to torn branches, occasional ice and

the slow intimation of landfall.

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By David Selzer