The Migration of Swallows

Once, people looked up, 

found the sky emptying, and wondered

where the swallows, fat on flies,

had disappeared to:

it was always the same - arrivals 

as though they had materialised,

miraculous, as if sprouted, sudden,

from the stone and timber itself

until the autumned dying of departure,

a terminus and its revisit of a cool

beginning to settle on the skin,

a season relinquishing. 
 

Never to the moon though, these journeys, 

no swoop has ever travelled such a distance -

though all migrating birds 

have a look about them: iron-eyed,

streamlined to plough a sky

as if it was time for the cut of new earth,

a softening against the tenacity of themselves,

scarred in cloud and ozone. 
 

And over seas too, 

a forgotten god's blood run cold,

salt rising from its ichor and yet,

giving up is impossible, an annihilation:

so with them, I keep south, south, 

even when love is in a procession

away from me and the words of salvage

winter in my mouth, an ebb tide,

I will not fight,

I will watch the swallows leave again

to solve the mysteries of light. 
 

Image is from wikimedia commons: https://commons.m.wikimedia.org/wiki/File:Ferdinand_von_Wright_-_Barn_Swallow_-_A_II_815-16_-_Finnish_National_Gallery.jpg

On Twitter, also this image: https://commons.m.wikimedia.org/wiki/File:Heubach_barn_swallow.jpg