Swifts

The swifts are back in Bexley, like summer's conscience.

I hear the streamers of their sound over roofs and roads, before I see their shapes.

The sound is familiar and strange, it lifts something in me that is old and joyful,
laid down when I was a child.

But I worry for them, these 'frail, travelling coincidences' as Larkin said once, about something else.

Fare well, swifts, keep flying and feeding above us.