Keening
a hope-giving thing
Hello. This post is about Death & Birds.
When I was young, I would sometimes walk to the churchyard and lay on the grass next to my mother’s grave. The boundaries between self, ground, bone, now, and then, all become rather permeable in certain places, and this was one of them. At times I’d have the vague sense of someone watching me from a distance, and I wonder whether perhaps it was me, here, in the future. Once, an elderly man (who, in hindsight was probably in his fifties) came and asked me if I was alright. I sat up, answering that I was, and he asked if he might sit with me a while. I obliged him, and he went on to share that his daughter was buried in the churchyard, having died many years ago, as a baby. We sat together quietly in our longing, beneath a sky scored by the dark bodies of a hundred Swifts. Their cries, like wind navigating narrow gaps, became the keening that neither I nor this gentleman were afforded. And now, it is June, and the Swifts have again returned—though fewer, and fewer, with every passing year. The sky no longer filled, only dappled—how it, too, must long for what it’s lost.