Hirundines Poem by Giles Watson

1

Shall we take the old road,
where the green helleborine
nestles among ferns, where
ladies fear to go, for fear
of ghosts, and gentry shall not go
in snow? Shall we weave
through lime-slab gripping
roots of weathered oaks,
and beeches holding flints
within their grips? Where
dew drips three hours after dawn,
and snakes go not, for fear
of torpor? Shall we go,
bypass the house, and the museums,
and come, at last,
to the Long Lythe, where
the ground dips to the stream
from Gilbert’s grave?

Sit here, and watch
his hirundines wheel
where human dreams
have failed.

2

Beech woods fringed
with milk-spilt elder;
jackdaws chack and clatter,
rooks utter blackness,
eggshells spill from nests,
cracked and bloodied,
the life writhed from them.

The world widens, from
the twice-five petalled campion,
the sulphured ranunculus,
the spiked sedge, over
Oakhanger Stream, by way
of ash and birch, through
flags in forests of spiked green,
half encased in folding sepals.

Fringed by ragged robins
spanned by spiders’ webs,
and primeval equisetum,
sun-bleached lady’s smocks -
measured infinitessimally
by spindled skaters, tadpoles
and toadlets, writhing in clumps,
bug-eyed waterboatmen,
waterspiders with silvered bellies -
ponds mirror open sky,
where hirundines wheel,
and seem to swim, inverted,
under water.

But the hirundines
are not as they would have been:
devil’s birds, bills clapping
on swarms of insects undescribed,
gulping uncatalogued midges
like whales sifting krill. Let us
recreate them, while we can:

3

Whether it be, he wrote, as sport,
A treat to take away the toil
Of long migration, (or, and well
May a man, middle aged
And grown rheumatic, favour this:
To warm the blood, grown cold
From long benumbing) ,
House martins like to play
Before they turn to mansion building.

“Aerobatics before architecture, ”
Their twitter seems to say,
Like grasshoppers chiding ants
For toiling all the day.

But then they set to mud daubing,
Their bills turned spatulas,
Deft and minute, testing consistency,
Flitting untwittering to the eaves
Each with a bib of gathered mud
Primed for plastering. Then clinging
With legs feathered to the toes,
Begin the building, layer on layer,
Lump on lump - but not for too long,
For houses built in haste
Must fall, when they are made
From clay. Paste a little, let it
Harden every day. Keep the rest
To seek the sun, and play.

Twelve days to construct a hemisphere:
Rustic work, no finished stucco here,
But inside, rendered soft and warm
By straw and moultings, moss
And interwoven wool, the mansion
Is made; the mother hides inside.

The nestlings strain, with naked
Old men’s necks, gaping
With insatiable gobs and gullets,
Their caustic excrement encased
In film unpierced by mother’s bill,
Until they learn, as babies
Learn the potty, to void it
Out the nest’s own puckered
Orifice, flagging their presence
With lime all down the wall.

Three weeks’ spasm of toil,
And they gaze, wide-mouthed,
Wide-eyed, from the gape,
Waiting to fly, yearning to play,
Exchanging insects in mid air;
Their mother lays again,
And raises again, ‘til time
Runs out for laying. The south,
Or sleeping, summons,
The last brood starve unfledged,
Flailing in their dark tomb,
Juices seeping through
The straw and soil.

The first lesson ended:
Birds and men must play
Before they toil.

4

The snap of a watch case
Is an insect taken, above
An unmown meadow, where
Soldier beetles mate on stems,
Spiders trundle white globes
And leaf hoppers aspire
To sky.

Her scissortailed flight
Moulds to the contour
Of chalk hills, dipping through
The vale to the village, where
Her wings make little thunder
Echoing down the chimney;
Her babies beckon in the dark,
Muting over the edge
Of their mud-moulded dish
White lime to blind Tobit
Down below. They are deep
In the chimney, where hobbies
Cannot catch them, and jackdaws
Do not grab them, emerging,
Above or below, mysteriously
Unsooted. Perched in a circle
Around the chimney pot,
Then, in an expectant line
Along a dead branch, testing
Flight like first time swimmers
Afraid of cold water.

She sings
Her signal. Dam and fledgeling
Ascend, to meet in mid-air
The insect exchanged,
The watch case closed.

The lesson ends: for sleep or flight
Her children form expectant rows.


5

Delighting not in cottages or towns,
Spurning even barns half tumbled-down,
She is fera natura, disclaiming domestic attachments,
Delighting in wide waters and sandy banks,
Nidificating underground.

Mouse-coloured and diffident,
Vacillating in flight like a butterfly
Bewildered by too many flowers -
Perhaps she means thereby
To catch one, by this imitation -
She flits above lakes, or lonely oxbows
In slow-flowing streams, or hides her brood
Where downland churchyards crumble
Into seas, and tidewashed fingerbones
Blanch on unwalked strands.

She is the cryptogame, the Mystery,
Who sleeps where no man knows.


6

But this wheeling squeal is freedom’s song:

Life lived on wings that never grow tired,
Spiring into space for the sheer height
And light of it. Never alighting, not on stone
Or branch, or byre, never carrying twigs
Or quills, but mating in the air, plunging
Whole fathoms in the heat of it. The shriek
Of love is piercing from the height of it.

Fly in splendour. Go in peace,
To love; and serve no more.