‘Swallows, Swallows Poems Are Not the Point’

A Short Story from the Perspective of a Bird Migrating for the Winter

Title

‘Swallows, Swallows Poems Are Not the Point’

My name is Sean and I am a swallow. Each spring I fly from Africa to a little farm in County Derry, in the North of Ireland. I don’t want to sound dramatic, but I am just about 18 centimetres in length, and weigh 32 grams and I fly six thousand miles from Africa to reach Ireland each spring. I travel 200 miles every day and I begin my 6,000-mile journey in the middle of March.

I fly back at the beginning of September. I travel across western France, over the Pyrenees, through eastern Spain, then into Morocco and then across the Sahara. Then over the Congo rainforest and at last I reach my destination in South Africa. You wonder how I do this without GPS. And I cannot really tell you because I do not know myself. All I remember was hatching out in the roof of a byre on the farm that was owned by a farmer called James. He seemed to have a lot of children. He never moved the nest and he genuinely seemed to rejoice at the arrival of the swallows every spring. One of his sons was called Sean, and he was the first child to be born. So as I was the first to hatch out, my mother decided to call me Sean. I was happy for the first few weeks of life as all I had to do was sit in my nest along with my three siblings and wait for my parents to come back with my food. This was usually insects which I relished. The farmer seemed to be happy although he had to get up early and fetch the cows in from the fields and milk them every morning and evening. It was hard work. Sometimes his wife would come into the byre and ask him something or tell him something. Sometimes one of his daughters would bring a mug of tea out to him and he would put the mug on the window sill. One of his daughters was studying Shakespeare’s Winter’s Tale and she had loved the line about daffodils:

That come before the swallow dares, and take

The winds of March with beauty

She loved to see the daffodils coming into bloom in the spring. And yet she did not seem to know about the swallow’s nest in her father’s byre, or that we were migratory birds or that we would gather on the telegraph wires in September before flying away. So the father was in tune with the swallow’s migratory pattern. He used to write down the date the first swallow arrived, whereas his daughter was experiencing the swallow in a literary way.

The good thing about being a swallow is that you don’t have to think too much. Really all you have to do is to sit on a nest and be fed for the first 16 days of your life by concerned parents, parents who make countless trips from the nest and return with insects, which the little chicks devour.  If you ever have the good fortune to see a swallow’s nest up close, you will see four or five little mouths gaping and cheeping like muppets in a muppet show. It may not be the most endearing picture, but just remember that later on these very same gaping, needy infants will be doing acts of derring-do in the sky and gracing the countryside as they gather before the big exodus.     

So after trying out my wings, and after a few tumbles, I was soon able to do my aerial manoeuvres, and I was so proud of my sky pirouettes. I was basically an exhibitionist. Mother nature had given barn swallows a forked tail and this gave them an edge in swooping and diving. The first summer I spent on James’ farm was the happiest summer of my life. I was carefree and the atmosphere on the farm was joyful. I was sad to leave. I knew without really knowing why I knew, that things would never be the same again. I knew that if I survived my maiden flight to Africa, that I would be returning to James’ byre and that my nest would be still intact. But I had a premonition that something was going to happen that would shatter James’ home. I hoped I was wrong, because I knew he welcomed the swallows each year and he even scolded his sister who lived on a neighbouring farm for locking the barn door one year because she said she was tired of the mess the swallows left.

‘Don’t you realise’ he remonstrated, ‘the swallows fly all the way from Africa, and surely the least we could do is welcome them with open arms’.  

Well, I gathered at the agreed meeting point and when we were all assembled we flew to the coast and began our journey. It was a pretty tough journey and not all of us survived the trip. Unlike humans, we don’t get stressed out when one of us drops out of the sky and plunges into the sea. As the poet Howard Nemerov writes in his poem, ‘The Blue Swallows’:

Swallows, swallows poems are not

 The point. Finding again the world,

That is the point, where loveliness

Adorns intelligible things

Because the mind’s eye lit the sun

When I arrived in Cape Peninsula I could not believe how warm and sunny it was. I was glad we had followed the sun and I began at once to forage with the rest of the flock. At night we roosted in the reed beds at Strandfontein. There was a large number of other birds including pink flamingos. There were egrets, gulls, Cape teals, herons, ducks and African sacred ibises. I spent a glorious time there and as March drew near, I knew I would soon be getting ready to head back to Ireland. I still had a premonition that some tragedy had befallen James and I hoped I was wrong. Even if something tragic had happened to James, I knew our return would bring joy to his soul and ‘his mind’s eye’ would be lit as we took up our residence and began refurbishing our nest. He would shade his eyes and look up at us flitting and soaring across the sky, and our chirping and cheeping would cheer his heart.