I took it for granted the flight of the swallows
all through the hot summer days of my childhood.
And then when they stopped I never missed them
until i found them decades later as a passing mention
in a Katherine Mansfield story.


And there they were those hot summer days,
lazy, hazy, sunny, a sky so blue, pale blue,
cerulean with a lot of mellow yellow
and the lines around the houses so sharp,
they looked like cut outs,
glued together to make a picture.
No shade in the stark midday sun
and the warm lemonade
and the dripping ice cream
coudn’t cool me down.
Nothing could but
the flight of the swallows over my head.

Those hot days,
hot on waking and just getting hotter
boiling by bedtime
so unpleasantly warm and lazy,
remember my mother sitting with her legs wide open,
remember the aunts doing the same
all through those hot summer days,
where they horny or
just lazily hot.

The farmer next door starting his tractor
in the lazy heat, disturbing
the flight of the swallows.
Remember there were always at least two, three nests
under the heaves,
every summer,  we could hear the squeaking of the young and
then we knew
that terrible heat would soon be broken
by the last flight of the swallows over our heads.