Tomorrow, the Swallows

Don Raymond 

“…yet they may conceal themselves in the banks of pools and rivers…”

— Gilbert White, The Natural History of Selborne

stop, stir, flitter; are still once more.
They murmur to themselves among
the broken branches of the sky:
the days grow shorter, cold and somber,
and they should by now be far from here
but none have gone, come late October;
no southward flight this year.

Through the season’s hollow echo
over winter’s marble floor
where sound as if across
vast aching distance, comes
like distant rumors of war.
But here the world’s grown small enough
to fit a swallow – birds enough to fill
the little bird-shaped holes that lie
within the trodden autumn’s liquid earth.

Tomorrow, the swallows
one by one flit up and swirl,
gray as clouds in a winter sky.
Slip beneath the water’s surface
to spend the frozen weeks half-dead
and dreaming of spring, clinging
to mossy rocks or bits of deadwood
along the stream-bed’s trickling course.

Tomorrow the swallows
sleep underwater – puddles
edged with rimes of ice.
Tomorrow the swallows
carry no papers:
in war’s season it isn’t wise
for one so small to fly so far,
so the swallows will stay at home
beneath the steam’s slow-trickling bed.
Hoping that someday they might see
the southern world’s skies again;
but tomorrow the swallows
will rest in the rivers -
tomorrow the swallows
breathe water instead.

The Science

The barn swallow, Hirundo rustica, migrates annually from Europe to winter in Africa.  However, before the advent of radio banding, our ability to track them was limited to the distance of the eye’s vision.  All that was known was that the birds disappeared in autumn only to reappear the following spring; what happened to them during the cold season was unknown. Aristotle suggested that they went into hibernation; he wrote that they “have been often found in holes, quite denuded of feathers,” and suggested that storks and turtle doves, also both migrating species, did likewise.

Powerful flyers who specialize in catching insects on the wing, swallows were observed to gather in autumn around ponds and rivers.  This may have been what led a student of Linnaeus, one A.M. Berger, to expand on Aristotle’s hypothesis with the idea that swallows in fact hibernate underwater.  This poem is based on David Quammen’s essay, “The Swallow That Hibernates Under Water” in his collection Wild Thoughts From Wild Places, about the English naturalist Gilbert White, who mentioned this idea in his 1788 book The Natural History of Selbourne.  White felt it was unlikely that recently-fledged hatchlings would “shift their quarters at this late season to the other side of the northern tropic” 

Nonetheless, they do; even the youngest barn swallows migrate.  Beginning in late August through September in northern Europe.  English barn swallows are believed to migrate as far south as South Africa, a grueling transcontinental journey many of those nestlings do not survive. As the world tilts again towards global conflict, I thought the swallows might once more want to reconsider their travel plans.

The Poet

Originally from San Jose, Don Raymond now lives in the deer-haunted hamlet of Alturas, CA, where he works as an accountant for the county, something his guidance counselors never warned him about.  His writing has appeared in Analog, Penumbric, and The Saturday Evening Post, among others. He spends his free time arguing with the local wildlife.

Next poem: Tori line by Amelia Dowler