Poetry by Ted Hughes: ‘Swifts’

The globe is not working ❤️‍🩹

Our Champion for this month, Nicola Chester, spoke in her interview about a poem that created a powerful and everlasting memory. Isn’t it funny how words can impact us so deeply and stay with us, tucked away, for perhaps the rest of our lives?

Nicola is fond of farm birds — you can hear her speak beautifully about them in her full interview (link). She’s also a super talented writer and recommended this poem to us. We wanted to share it with you. Enjoy.

Title: Swifts

Poet: Ted Hughes

Originally published in Season Songs (Faber, 1976)

Fifteenth of May. Cherry blossom. The swifts

Materialize at the tip of a long scream

Of needle. ‘Look! They’re back! Look!’ And they’re gone

On a steep

Controlled scream of skid

Round the house-end and away under the cherries. Gone.

Suddenly flickering in sky summit, three or four together,

Gnat-whisp frail, and hover-searching, and listening

For air-chills – are they too early? With a bowing

Power-thrust to left, then to right, then a flicker they

Tilt into a slide, a tremble for balance,

Then a lashing down disappearance

Behind elms.

They’ve made it again,

Which means the globe’s still working, the Creation’s

Still waking refreshed, our summer’s

Still all to come —

And here they are, here they are again

Erupting across yard stones

Shrapnel-scatter terror. Frog-gapers,

Speedway goggles, international mobsters —

A bolas of three or four wire screams

Jockeying across each other

On their switchback wheel of death.

They swat past, hard-fletched

Veer on the hard air, toss up over the roof,

And are gone again. Their mole-dark labouring,

Their lunatic limber scramming frenzy

And their whirling blades

Sparkle out into blue —

Not ours any more.

Rats ransacked their nests so now they shun us.

Round luckier houses now

They crowd their evening dirt-track meetings,

Racing their discords, screaming as if speed-burned,

Head-height, clipping the doorway

With their leaden velocity and their butterfly lightness,

Their too much power, their arrow-thwack into the eaves.

Every year a first-fling, nearly flying

Misfit flopped in our yard,

Groggily somersaulting to get airborne.

He bat-crawled on his tiny useless feet, tangling his flails

Like a broken toy, and shrieking thinly

Till I tossed him up — then suddenly he flowed away under

His bowed shoulders of enormous swimming power,

Slid away along levels wobbling

On the fine wire they have reduced life to,

And crashed among the raspberries.

Then followed fiery hospital hours

In a kitchen. The moustached goblin savage

Nested in a scarf. The bright blank

Blind, like an angel, to my meat-crumbs and flies.

Then eyelids resting. Wasted clingers curled.

The inevitable balsa death.

Finally burial

For the husk

Of my little Apollo —

The charred scream

Folded in its huge power.