Carpark swallows
Janet Kenny
See the darting swallows slip
past truck and tractor at the tip.
And see the tiny arrows swoop
in parking stations to a group
of smaller swallows nestled high
above the traffic. Tell me why
such dainty creatures choose to be
in dark and dingy misery?
I’ve seen them skim across the grass
and tour the beaches, lightly pass
across the waves and up a cliff
to snatch a gnat and dash as if
another atom might escape
the rosy throat as beak agape
they trawl the air for flies so small
for humans there’s no fly at all.
Swallow brains and genes have found
that deep in caves above the ground
no predators will steal their young.
Their basket-nests so tightly hung
on metal pipes above the cars,
survive the racket; Shangri-las
where no rapacious birds will seek
the young or hear the hungry squeak.
After the fledging off they flit
to wires outside to sit a bit
before they leave for wilder things.
The nest remains and always brings
a sadness to the motorist
who watched them grow. A secret tryst,
one-sided though that love might be;
a seasonal complicity.
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Janet’s notes: “A Sydney phenomenon in underground carparks. Published in Whistling in the Dark, Kelsay Books.”
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Janet Kenny left New Zealand to pursue a career as an operatic and concert singer in London, then settled in Sydney, Australia, where she worked in the anti-nuclear movement and jointly compiled, wrote and edited a book about the nuclear industry, Beyond Chernobyl, published by Envirobook in 1993. Her poems have been published in many printed and online journals. She has published two collections of poems: This Way to the Exit (White Violet Press) and Whistling in the Dark (Kelsay Books). Her work is in several anthologies including Outer Space: 100 Poems, edited by Midge Goldberg and published by Cambridge University Press. This last particularly delights her because she is number 79 in the list of 100 poets who in recorded time have written in some way about space, including Homer, Michelangelo, Shakespeare, Goethe, Shelley, Pushkin, Housman, Yeats, Lorca, Wilbur, Stallings and Simic. She is very sorry she can’t tell her late husband. He would have laughed.
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