They are like flecks of punctuation – parentheses set free from some imaginary prison to soar across the page of the sky; diving commas that tear the air; circling apostrophes, eye-wateringly high, that suggest ownership of what?
The heavens? Our hearts? Mine, certainly.
What sentence do swifts write across the sky? That there is a better world? That the tawdriness and depravity of recent weeks and months – Savile, Hall, Cleveland – is not all there is?
Lift up thine eyes and see, they seem to say. Look how we dance and sing. First here. And now here. And here! There is glory and beauty, they say. We fly in its honour.
Every year – just this weekend past in my parish as it happens, glory be – they return, swooping low to transform Victorian terraces into giant pinball arcades, ricocheting off the sides of houses as if the very walls are the flippers, belting up to the eaves and away again, only to return to repeat the same manoeuvre as they search for last year's breeding perch.
They burst across our vision with that telltale summer scream as if in a new game from Sony. Forget square and triangle and the rest – there is no PlayStation controller that can activate these moves.
Look at you, they seem to say. You call that dexterity? You and your beloved glitches in those games. Pah!
Watch this – and out of nowhere they appear, hurtling between two houses, tipping their wings to exit, scooting – you are sure – through the telegraph wires and making the Red Arrows look about as nimble as a line of wheelie bins.
The only call of duty we should obey now is to acknowledge these lords of the air, defer to their otherworldly agility, respect the fact that these stunt birds dance to a different drum.
Arriving in our skies from Africa, from the heart of darkness, sleeping on the wing, travelling unimaginable distances to come to these roofs – your roofs – and staying with us just a few short weeks, we cannot fail to be moved.
We know we should not anthropomorphise. We know we should not romanticise. All is science and evolution. Earth's magnetic currents and the search for food.
Yet who doesn't see something magnificent in the journey of the swift?
Who doesn't want to bid them welcome when they arrive and wish them God speed when they depart?
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