I'll start with the crows and/or rooks gathering in the field. I missed the huge mass of them, they were starting to settle by the time I found a place to film.
Group feeding was the story of the day.
I had been down on the meadow by the reservoir doing a worm survey in two places - neutral soil but only one worm in each place. It was too dry. The poor second worm was in diapause - estivating to wait out the dry conditions.
Anyway, a few days before, Mischa had told me about the swifts there screaming around her head, so close that it was magical. I'd experienced it briefly that day, but this time, after I had replaced the soil and the turf, I just sat there for... it could have been two minutes or ten. They came so close I could hear the whir of their wings, see the glint of eyes. Twice two chased each other - the most incredible acrobatics. The precision. The pace.
It was heart-stopping. I felt, I really felt... oh, this is embarrassing but this is what came to me... in the presence of the Goddess. It was transcendent.
I have been trying to write... it started as... What am I to them? As dull as a stone, as still as a tree... I was thinking of the speed of their mental processing, the processing of their vision, which is so much faster than ours. In Being a Beast, Charles Foster* thinks that they slow time by being so fast... they experience, say, five times more per second than we do - so it's as though a second is five times longer. They mold time, they carve air, they stitch continents together and earth is as nothing to them....
Work in progress...
Sky dancers, wind skaters, scimitar-winged -
black silhouettes carving air with their speed -
swifts - made of a substance finer than flesh
which too solid earth cannot hold or suppress.
My life slows to these stretched moments -
time remolded by spiraling flight.
Close - so close - whirring wings stir my senses.
And the goddess is here, just out of my sight.
*Foster has written another book all about swifts. Might have to read it now.
Wonderful about the swifts! Reading about them. I'm checking with sister if there are any on PEI. Don't think so. I like very much how you share the experience in your poem -- their speed and that sense of stretched time!