I was thinking, what will I write to Hero about that could be of use to him? So I’m going to write about the swifts. You probably know already they’re the birds that live some of the year in Africa and some of the year here and in other places in Europe and Scandinavia. They are about to arrive here again any day, at least I hope they are. Last year they arrived May 13th. In Brighton we’re among the earliest to see swifts returning to the UK. My mother has this saying, about the swifts being what make a summer happen: ‘it’s when the swifts arrive and when the swifts leave that marks the start and the end of a summer.’ Apparently her mother said it, and her mother’s mother said it. I think that makes swifts a bit like a flying message in a bottle. There’s a poem by the poet Emily Dickinson that I like. It says (though it says it more poetically than I am here) what would happen if you split a lark open? I have a vision that if you were to open a swift, metaphorically of course, the rolled-up message they carry inside them is the unfurled word SUMMER.
