What The Schoolmaster Said:
She flicks past, ahead of her name,
Twinkling away out over the lake.
Reaching this way and that way, with her scissors,
Snipping midges
Trout are too numb and sunken to stir for.
Sahara clay ovens, at mirage heat,
Glazed her blues, and still she is hot.
She wearied of snatching clegs off the lugs of buffaloes
And of lassooing the flirt-flags of gazelles.
They told her the North was one giant snowball
Rolling South. She did not believe them.
She exchanged the starry chart of Columbus
For a beggar’s bowl of mud.
Did she close her eyes and trust in God?
No, she saw lighthouses
Streaming in chaos
Like sparks from a chymney –
She had fixed her instruments on home.
So now, suddenly, into a blanch-tree stillness,
A silence of celandines,
A fringing and stupor of frost
She bursts, weightless –
and anchors
On eggs frail as frost.
There she goes, flung taut on her leash,
Her eyes at her mouth-corners,
Water-skiing out across a wind
That wrecks great flakes against windscreens.
What The Farmer’s Wife Said:
It’s the loveliest thing about swallows,
The moment they come,
The moment they dip in, and are suddenly there.
For months you just never thought about them
Then suddenly you see one swimming maybe out there
Over our bare tossing orchard, in a slattery April blow,
Probably among big sloppy snowflakes.
And there it is – the first swallow,
Flung and frail, like a midge caught in the waterskin
On the weir’s brink – and straightaway you lose it.
You just got a glimpse of whisker and frailty
Then there’s nothing but jostled daffodils, like the girls running in from a downpour
Shrieking and giggling and shivering
And the puckered primrose posies, and the wet grit.
It’s only a moment, only a flicker, easy to miss –
That first swallow just swinging in your eye-corner
Like a mote in the wind-smart,
A swallow pinned on a roller of air that roars and snatches it away
Out of sight, and booms in the bare wood
And you know there’ll be colder nights yet
And worse days and you think
‘If he’s here, there must be flies for him’
And you think of the flies and their thin limbs in that cold.
What The Vicar Said:
I agree
There’s nothing verminous, or pestilential, about swallows.
Swallows are the aristocrats
The thoroughbreds of summer.
Still, there is something sinister about them.
I think it’s their futuristic design.
The whole evolution of aircraft
Has been to resemble swallows more and more closely.
None of that propellor-blur, ponderous, biplane business
Of partridges and pheasants,
Or even the spitfire heroics of hawks.
When I was a boy I remember
Their shapes always alarmed me, slightly,
With the thought of the wars to come,
The speed beyond sound, the molten forms.
You might say
They have a chirruppy, chicken-sweet expression
With goo-goo starlet wide-apart eyes,
And their bills seem tiny, almost retroussé cute –
In fact, the whole face opens
Like a jet engine.
And before this, they solved the problem, did they not,
Of the harpoon.