Swifts

To see through a mask of billowing smoke, erupting out of factory turrets, only to find a ravine of cobblestone and grimy windows will hurt you.

A dark alley under a rugged sky is all that meets your green-eyed gaze, and it will hurt.

The promise will never be fulfilled.

And you know it.

The swifts will not come, but when they soar, elegant wings spread wide over the raspy breeze, then hope shall be restored.

When bowler-hatted men look up, mouth open a sliver, then shocked silence will reign.

When Kipling puts pen to paper, when Thunberg steps foot on cobblestone, when Ibn Battuta feels the camel’s fur and Attenborough peers down a camera, promises can be made.

But not until you escape this wretched pig iron city, and your toes dig into the crosshatched forest floor, then your thirst will be quenched.

To journey down that wretched same alley, and know that the same wretched alley will not echo the flurry of the promised swifts, and hear the yells of your name and patter of machine guns on stone, you will be hurt.

But the gunfire misses.

And you know it will.

Someday, the cogs will slow, the smoke will fade, and the wars will cease.

And the drowsy rain will part for swifts.

And someday, you will escape.

The forest, the emerald among a block of lead, will welcome you, take you in like the orphan and the outcast you are.

And you will hear the birdcall, and smell the flowers, and taste honey and stroke the fur of wolves and bears.

And you will see the swifts.

The promised swifts among the promised forest.