Poetry Friday: Birdtober Day One: Swift

 

 

 

I'm not at all sure that I'll be able to do every day of this Birdtober challenge, but I'm going to try. (Check back during the week to see how I get on, or I'll post links to all of them on Fridays.) Certainly I had to do the first day, for which the prompt is a generic "Swift." There are about a hundred species of swifts throughout the world, but here in Haiti we have the Antillean Palm-Swift, so that's what I wrote about.

Yes, wrote. Birdtober is supposed to be about visual art, but I'm borrowing photos to illustrate, and writing instead.

I learned a lot about the swifts in general and the Antillean Palm-Swift in particular, only a tiny bit of which shows up in the poem. For example, the family name is Apodidae, meaning footless. My first draft used the word "footless," but I replaced it with "footloose," because they aren't really footless. They got that name because they hardly ever use their feet, since they are almost always flying. Antillean Palm-Swifts have purple feet, reportedly. I wouldn't know, because they never hold still, and I only see them flying way way way above me. But I believe it, because Philip Henry Gosse, the British naturalist who first named them in Jamaica in the 1840s, tells us without a trace of regret that he saw a bird clinging to a nest, "which I shot." Presumably he then held it in his hand to examine every part. You can read more of his detailed and fascinating description here. (I'll put links to more of my sources at the end of the post.)

I really wanted to put Gosse himself in the poem, because he was quite the character, but I didn't - this time. Maybe later! 

 

You'll see in the poem that they build nests, in common with other swift species, using their spit; this species nests in coconut palms.  You'll also see some more of their habits.

Photo Credit: Joshua Vandermeulen, eBird.com

Antillean Palm-Swift


Darting
up
above
the sands

Eats
mid-air
and rarely
lands

Catches
bugs
and sleeps
while flying

Flapping,
squeaking,
high-pitched
crying

Black
and white,
retreats,
advances

Island-
dweller
twitters,
dances

Coco-
nutty
nests
of spit

Footloose,
fancy,
flit
flit
flit

©Ruth Bowen Hersey

 

Sources: Antillean Palm-Swift, eBird, Swift Wikipedia, Antillean Palm-Swift Wikipedia, Antillean Palm-Swift DataZone BirdLIfe International, Philip Henry Gosse, Swifts - info and games 

Catherine at Reading to the Core has today's roundup.