The Difference Between Swallows & Swifts
Sky-diving showstoppers, swallows topple off trees, flame-throw
Wafts into downdrafts of black-blown flow,
high-pitch miaow
Around telegraph poles, tag and follow one another, plough
Lines of light to scribble musical scores,
pour down in arrows
Loosened from a thundercloud’s bow; narrow shadows billow
Over gunpowder crows who gobble up flies
browsing on cows below
Where the river flows shallow and hollowed-out willows
Sag with the sundown featherweight
of wound-down swallows
whereas
Swifts skim the rims of jetstreams, hitch quick lifts on a riptide
Wind, whistle down twists of double-dipper
gusts, joyride
In underpasses of shower-cloud towns, lift flipped wings
For rapid-fire lightning strikes on meadow brown
butterflies alighting on
Top heavy hedgerows: fields blacken to a splatter as their knives
Scatter butter, the flies shocked and shattered
by the swift-split sky.
Julian Bishop’s first collection of eco poems called We Saw It All Happen was published in 2023 by Fly On The Wall Press. A former environment journalist turned poet, he lives in Barnet with his family and dog and runs a small media company. He’s currently working on a follow-up collection of eco poems as well as a separate project about the life and times of the Italian painter Caravaggio.
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