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swifts

DULCE DOMUM

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.

 

FROM A BALCONY

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.

 

 

NEXT YEAR

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.

 

 

 

 

SWIFTS

David Selzer By David Selzer3 Comments1 min read518 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.

 

 

 

LANDFALL

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.

 

 

 

WHILE YOU WERE SLEEPING

You were here last year in your mother’s womb

at this cottage high above the straits.

Now you grab for buttercups, daisies, clover,

self-heal – and edge toward sleep in the stillness

under the parasol. Ringlet butterflies

flit across the grass. Blackbirds forage

among the mulch of last autumn’s leaves

at the margin where garden and woodlands merge.

A pheasant rattles somewhere out of sight.

Watching over you is a privilege.

Some time since last year, a sheep, lost in the woods,

died at the lawn’s edge. An elderberry

sapling is growing through the skull. The trees –

ash, oak, beech – are loud with hidden insects.

Nearby, a pair of buzzards is breeding.

They soar above us suddenly, calling:

pee-yah, pee-yah – hover, then bank away

over the tree line. And just as suddenly

the air is replete with other birds – swifts,

swallows, house martins, a jay, a herring gull.

On the mainland, roiling clouds envelop

Moel Wnion and the Carnedd range beyond,

their iron age settlements and the sheep runs,

and thick rain, all shades of grey from pencil

to gun metal, fills Bethesda’s slate quarries.

A military jet rip-roars the length

of the straits, simulating the Persian Gulf,

and a small factory ship thrums steadily,

hoovering mussels from their beds for Spain.

It’s a chancy universe, little one!

But here the sun still shines. You are waking.