Swift Diaries

Prison Time and Swift Trails

Photo: Jo Maher

I occupied the front steps on Monday evening for a while. A neighbour waved and asked me, ‘Any swifts?’ The sky had a chill-blue feel to it. I had only seen one swift all day. I had very little of note to say to the neighbour: it’s hard to talk for long about something that isn’t there (unless the discussion is focused on why the birds haven’t materialised in any number).

By Thursday, the mood-music on the street had changed. Swifts screamed up and down, cutting through the shadowy gap between our house and next door. They had brought back the swish you only get from hurtling swifts - the electric current that plays across my skin and shakes my core. I stood there thinking about the transition from few swifts to many. What had triggered this change? The rise in air temperature, or a shift in the prevailing wind direction? The distribution of insects to feed on? I had to admit I couldn’t begin to understand this refinement. This is my ‘default setting’ when it comes to the swifts these days. There’s a part of me that wants to solve the puzzle: I want to know why swifts appeared in droves over the Co-op on Friday afternoon. Where had they been? But to weigh all these questions is for me to be aware there aren’t any answers - or possibly looking at it another way, to ask these questions is missing the point. Being in a state of uncertainty is actually a good place to be. It has taken me many years to accept this state of affairs.

My first job teaching creative writing was in a prison. I used to commute from Sheffield to Nottingham three days each week to talk to men about their writing, help them think about their words. I taught mostly inmates - though I used to strike up conversations with one of the guards about his love of poetry, and the Governor was an accomplished writer who shared his work too. I was given keys (I can still recall the shape of the two keys that could open all the ‘accessible’ doors in the place), so theoretically I could go anywhere: visiting men in classrooms, on the wing, in their cells. One thing I soon realised about the environment I was negotiating was how little I knew about what was going on. I set up ‘workshops’ through the education department but also wandered (or wondered) around, trying to make sense of half-heard conversations, the subtext in gestures, looks, the patterns of prison time. Landings had their own demotic: I tried to translate this new language into something I could gauge, view clearly but must have misread (or misheard) most of what came my way.

Each night, on the train home, I started writing short poems about my bafflement. I wrote poems that leaned heavily into one version of negative capability: they spoke of confusion, of not knowing, of lack. I reached toward some odd moments of clarity, but these interludes seemed to come at me like a passing lighthouse’s beam across a dark ocean. Once I began to take on board how little knowledge was available to me (or how much information I was barred from) my poems took shape. It was a tough lesson that made me a better writer.

Now that I have started writing poems about swifts, I feel that I have come full circle. When I look up (though this time not through safety mesh netting) I follow movements that I have no solution to. I am an insignificant observer, without any leverage or influence in the matter. I cannot decode the vocabulary that I heed, in those short bursts, above my head. What are these creatures? Why are they here now? I still ask, but know nothing plain will come from this. I hang in their slipstream, and then look up again.

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Here are the diary entries from notes I have posted this week:

17th May

The only sighting of the day, early: a swift pitches toward our upstairs window then pivots over the garden, brushing the top of the hazelnut tree and away.

18th May

For the first time this year, I stand in the garden this evening and a swift wobble-circles over my head three or four times. It’s close enough for me to pick out its forked tail. It makes me think of a bookmark.

19th May

The swifts are screaming over Bradley street. They’re navigating the warm raindrops that dapple afternoon pavements.

Later, swifts flicker just above our garden. They pitch up and down almost in unison. It’s only 7.30pm but the two dive toward the houses opposite and disappear for the evening.

20th May

I look up and there are various-shaped clouds stretching across the evening - ones like chiffon scarves underneath those bigger flatter pinker clouds. The shaving of the moon in blue sky. Aeroplanes leaving their trails.

At 7.50pm I count one, two, three, four swifts as they swing over our garden - low enough to be full of sunlight, slivers of song coming off them.

21st May

If you want one image of an urban swift summer, it is this: lunchtime on Crookes, I hear them first, then glance up at the twenty or so swifts sailing above the Co-op.

22nd May

Hathersage lido. Because my eyes are so shocking now, the swifts are blurry shapes. I track them by their screams - over the rooftops, the water, across the park.

23rd May

A group of six come together then come apart over the garden, all sharp and bright, like a Swiss Army Knife.