For just one day – for just one afternoon –
they stream from clefts and tunnels, these,
the offered-up, the flight-blessed, fertile supplicants
of chance, aloft on likelihood’s indifference.
Their swarm’s a million-bodied single-mindedness
that peppers lightly at the window, jets
in arcing, rippled wakes across the pond,
disrupts the fine transmissions of the air
with fleets of static – dotty, buzzing, keen.
Whatever callous fraction will today achieve
fulfillment of that ache to seed the yet-to be
of one more summer’s spawning colony, the end
is uniform: abandonment, each driven flicker spent
and fallen. Near to dusk, on every surface
they will mass, unpurposed, blundering, defused
and dying, revelation’s ebbing flush
passed on – all lightness, all precision gone –
while overhead, re-lofted on a swirl of breeze,
low sun might fire a fitful scattering
of gleam: a sundered filigree of wings.
