Migrants Poem by Roger Hudson

Echoing
The myriad swallows
Perched like notes on a music sheet
On telegraph wires overhead
The children swing excitedly
On parallel strands of the wire fence
And cheer
Waving to passengers
As local push-and-shove steam train
Chuffs by beyond the end of the garden
Sparks flying upward
With the streaming soot-laden smoke

Evacuees from the nightly bombed city
Their future less certain
Than that of the swooping wheeling swallows
Assembled for migration
Or the dry stubble beside the track
Sparked here and there
Into short-lived fires
By the flying fragments