Poetry on Air

Yesterday I sat outside during my lunch break and watched the swallows fly. I've always liked watching birds--I like to admire their elegant form, the subtle patterns of their plumage, the preciseness of their movements--but thanks to my Bio 100 class, I have a whole new appreciation for winged things. I also have a chronic habit of attempting to identify every bird I come across, because we had to find and identify 100 species of birds over the course of the semester. So now I pay much more attention to the flickers of movement in the sky, which is how I discovered the swallows. After watching the more common birds flit around for several months, I learned to identify most of them by how they fly. Pigeons flap steadily, intent on where they're going. Sparrows are very business-like, zipping from place to place in a straight line with madly fluttering wings. Waxwings and woodpeckers fly like they're on a roller coaster--flapping for height, then tucking their wings in and free-falling, then flapping and climbing again--or like they're tracing an invisible sine wave through the air.

But swallows, oh, swallows dance.

They dip and turn and swirl and glide through the air, swift, graceful, elegant, colored like bits of living jewelry. They seem to fly just for the sheer joy of flying--skimming the ground, kiting upwards on breezes, turning on a wingtip and doubling back on themselves, riding the air like a leaf on the surface of a stream. All natural things have a certain poetry to them, but the flight of a swallow has more than most. They were beautiful to watch, and I was perfectly content to sit and watch them fly. And as I watched, I very much understood why the great minds of the 19th century felt that God was to be found in nature. How could something as beautiful as a swallow's flight not testify that there is a Creator? God is truly a god of wonders. Wonders which include the grace and elegance of one little bird.