They soar and swoop like twirling rope,
bring summer to its height.
Always, dark in their scythe-winged flight,
are harbingers of hope.
Should every cranny become filled,
no roughened surface left,
where will they cling and screeching, nest?
The air they play on stilled.
Crook-necked humanity looks down:
its newsfeed, end of times.
Ourselves alone in warmer climes
can choose to breathe or drown.
xi. 2021
* Apus apus, the scientific name for a Common Swift, means ‘no feet, no feet’ in Latin.
Generated from a workshop prompt - In Time of ‘The Breaking of Nations' by Thomas Hardy. I started with the first two lines of the last stanza and the last two of the first, then worked to see where the constraint of a formal end-rhyme pattern could take me.
ReplyDeletehttps://www.poetryfoundation.org/poems/57320/in-time-of-the-breaking-of-nations