an ascetic’s petitionary prayer, answered

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for six consecutive summers, i’ve observed barn swallows enter and inspect the barn — diving and swooping in and out, perching and chattering wholly unbothered by my presence — but not until this, my sixth summer, did they finally deem worthy and decide to make their nest on a joist in this old, ramshackle barn

to experience their nesting is such a tender mercy in the time of remote, yet constant virtual witness and heartrage of genocide, of global horrors and famine — and of the daily unnatural disasters and unrelenting evidence of abrupt, irreversible climate breakdown and biodiversity/ecosystems collapse.

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O swallows, swallows, poems are not The point. Finding again the world, That is the point, where loveliness Adorns intelligible things 
Because the mind’s eye lit the sun.

Howard Nemerov

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