What holds the swifts

The type of bright sunshine which gives grass an extra sort of lurid dimensionality is the same sort of sunshine which has been pouring through the attic windows and dousing the loft in evening light these past couple of weeks.

I’ve been taking refuge sitting in the armchair to enjoy the warmth, to think, and to pray. I feel sad about the news of people starving in Gaza as aid convoys are blocked, about the aggression of American politics, and about many things besides. So much tearing down.

In the midst of this, the swifts arrived on Sunday. I wanted to write something which posed the question of why destruction is so much easier than creation, how sparrows and swallows find their nests gone, fall out the sky, lose their young, yet are given a place to nest near the altar in Psalm 84, how that feels to God.

Instead, I wrote a short poem.

What holds the swifts

Suppose, for a moment,
God watches the swifts -
how they slice the evening light
like tiny scissors, 
their wingbeats in a score
older than sorrow.

I once heard that sermons
should not be exhortation but promise,
and so each swift's return 
is itself a sermon. 

And God, still watching, rejoices.