Swift Awareness Week rolls around again soon from Saturday 28 June to Sunday 6 July. One of the reasons why I began writing a diary in 2021 was because of SAW. I’m sure COVID must have played some part in my decision-making processes too. On reflection, the diary was a way of generating ready-made material for the poetry I was aiming to publish on social media through Swift Awareness Week. It was an experiment in process in this regard. Here are a few entry extracts from early May 2021:
May 1st
A dull day that feels like it’s got a pinch of winter still in it. The sky is daubed greys, clouds stack the horizon - the temperature won’t go much above ten.
May 8th
It rains through the afternoon and warms up too. The wind has changed direction today - it is a westerly. The clouds scud across the sky from the direction of the peak district. It feels humid in this rain, and with this in mind I step out of the back of the house at about 5pm, through the conservatory doors and look up.
When I come to create the poem I have a kitty of words and phrases I can dip into: for instance, ‘pinch of winter’ from May 1st. I also have a mood that I can lean into - that I can try to replicate in the weave of the poem itself. I conflate the atmosphere of the two days, how the weather changes, I can add simile and metaphor on top of the sparer descriptive language, and come up with this:
May 8th
There’s still a pinch of winter
about this east wind
in rain soft as filings
stitched with ice.
Later, the sky shifts:
a westerly brings
thin white clouds
this first swift
quivering its wings
a compass needle.
In the end I created five poems from the diary posts over May and June, early July - from the first sighting of a swift depicted in this piece (‘May 8th’), to the feeding of chicks (‘July 1st’). A piece to send out each weekday over SAW.
I was fortunate to be given some time off teaching last year so I could focus on my writing for part of the second semester. I decided quite late on, as I approached my sabbatical, that what I was going focus on was swifts. In February 2024 I began to plunder the material from 2021 dairy entries (both phrases, language but also ideas too), and when the time came, began a ‘parallel’ diary of 2024s comings and goings. I wrote very fast - faster than I’ve ever written in my creative life - and developed over twenty poems on swift seasons and associated themes. The form I choose to write in was the sonnet. I was interested in trying to capture speed and movement in a fixed form: how do you capture fluidity within the constraining structure of rhymes and controlled rhythms?
As part of Swift Awareness Week in 2024 I posted a version of the sonnet I’ve printed below. The draft I published last year I wasn’t particularly pleased with. I’ve come back to the lines this summer (I work on drafts of my poems for years), and I’ve made it better. But even so, I’m not sure it’s come completely into focus for me. Revising poetry is like going for an eye test. The words begin a bit blurry - but after some fine-tuning and fiddling about, suddenly they ‘sit’ crisp on the page. One of the reasons why I chose to push this poem into the world was that detail in the couplet at the end: my friend Joe told me about the parasitic louse that lives on swifts through the summer. I wanted this to be a bit of a surprise package at the end of quite a straightforward tribute. Here is the piece in full:
Swifts lived here before we came to pass.
There’s brickwork on the cooler eastern face
to thank for that, some creature’s knack to chase
shine-into-dark; though there’s more than glass
between these orchids and flickering birds;
more than floors between a room exchanging hands
and this caravan from Sub-Saharan sands
that lights on eaves via planetary swerves.
In a good year, they take up home from May
to August: time to ride again that mix
of insects, fumes and dust, to raise their chicks
before, wired to some arc, they curve away
toward the roof of sky. Think swift as house
sheltering all season a parasitic louse.
For Swift Awareness Week 2025, I’m going to preemptively post here another sonnet that I’ve been working on since last year. You might well see the poem again on Bluesky at the beginning of July. The piece was inspired by late-June high jinks in 2021 - see my post below for June 16th 2021. We still have a blackbird that sings ‘Barb-ie Girl’, by the way.
The clouds have turned all mother of pearl
in the pinkest dusk. Fixed to a rooftop
a blackbird spills I’m a Barb-ie girl
same lilt, same pitch and tempo, nonstop
for hours. A swift shears through the brickwork’s seam
then sings at passers-by. Its mate swoops in
to land this now-you-see-me trick. Tag team:
a solo bird tips out again, loops in
low beyond the bank of slates to glean
what little pick n’ mix it can from sky
that’s closing down, before a street lamp’s beam
shoulders the whole teetering frame of high
summer, and this outlier’s a trace, a gleam
burning across the hemisphere of my eye.
Here are some of the notes I’ve posted over the last week taken from 2021, 2024 and 2025, with some added extras:
June 15th 2024
I’ve been away to Glasgow for a few days with William. I don’t think I saw any swifts on the west coast of Scotland. This evening I went out front to make a call to Bob on a run - and a swift launched over my head (from the nest). It began to drizzle then rain so I waited to see if it would come back in. It did. Then when the sun came out (a square of sunlight on the side of the house) a swift skimmed out again. Is there one, or are there two? I’m just pleased we have a swift (swifts?) in the house. It’s been such a poor weather year for the swifts I’m happy they’ve hung around.
June 15th 2025
Occasionally when I play the swift calls the little black cat will come from over the road to see what is going on. Tonight - without the car on the drive - it slinks up to peer at the nest, and then at me and then pads away.
June 16th 2021
A day of vertiginous blue. Not a cloud. And no swifts...until I hear the screeches up over my right shoulder. Two swifts plane over my head - how the light catches the underside of their wings: two-tone, you can almost feel the softness, the brownness of their wings - one comes in very low over me - but is higher over the drop (an old quarry) just behind our garden - they can be low and high at the same time.
I watch a swift enter the nest at 9:57pm - only for another swift to emerge from the crack in the brickwork. It flies around for 10 minute then in the gloom fires back into the nest - straight-lined as opposed to the other one that jinks in each evening.
June 16th 2025
‘Any swift action?’ I’m standing in the middle of a residential street waiting for something to happen. A neighbour points up. At the top of sky we see them (just), hear them (just). ‘Look, there must be twenty of them.’
June 17th 2024
The first time I think we might have actually nesting swifts rather than a couple of layabout youngsters. A swift is peeping from under the eaves while its partner swings around the front of the house. The only reason it doesn’t join it is because it is warming eggs?
June 18th 2024
Tonight - a group of five or six swifts. Thunder means they are in and out. Two swifts play at 9:40pm in the gloom, then one breaks off and comes in - pulls away - flies in a big circle then splits the bricks on the corner of the house.
June 18th 2025
A little print of sun on the eastern facing wall as the sun goes west this evening. I park the car. Just before I go in, a swift swings in at 8:15pm - early if it’s the last we’ll see of it for the evening. It wheeps and its song is returned.
June 19th 2025
My mum phones me to ask how the swifts are getting on. I try to summarise what I think is happening. Frankly, I don’t know.
Walking down to the pub, I see loads of swifts. High over our street and, lower down the hill, there are rafts of swifts too. I haven’t seen so many swifts in years.
June 20th 2021
I look up and see five, six…I keep counting - maybe ten swifts high up in the sky, riding the thermals. The sky is overcast - it’s like the birds are scraping the ceiling, wheeling in huge loops, flying kilometres in no time. Earlier in the afternoon the screech party was lower but tonight they are hundreds of feet up in the air. Then one appears just above the roofs - sways and turns above the street and dances into the nest. I wait two minutes and at 8:02pm a bird appears from underneath the gutter - it launches straight out and up into the air.
June 20th 2024
The swifts are loving mid-summer. You know how much they are full of beans by the way they fly low over our garage, over our garden. We go out 8ish to see them fly out front. Strangely one of our swifts goes in early - an hour before dusk. I expected another swift to come out, but nothing. The sky is silent. There are no swifts about after 9pm.
June 21st 2025
A trip to Gloucestershire for a birthday party. Swallows wing around the fields that surround the house in combinations of ones and twos. More gentle. Less fury.
Thanks for reading this post. If you want to read my published work, including Little Piece Of Harm - which, like these swift diaries, is a kind of love letter to a city, you can find details on the Longbarrow Press website here. I also have a podcast where I interview poets about influence and poetics: The Two-Way Poetry Podcast. The two seasons of interviews are available on Podbean here.
As much as I love sky pick n mix image and the blackbird singing Aqua songs, this line is just perfect: A swift shears through the brickwork’s seam. Verbally and visually bang on.
Also not to jinx myself but I just submitted a poem about swifts to a local publication. (My) Chris said it was pretty dark. Naturally I blamed you as usual (but Jo played a part in its starting point too).