This is Bird Note. Birds can connect with us in surprising ways.

Poet and teaching artist Stefania Gomez recently had a profound experience with Vox's swifts

and was inspired to write a poem about it. It starts with an epigraph from Portland,

Audubon. Each September thousands of Vox's swifts congregate in the chimney of Chapman

Elementary School before they fly south the winter. Just before dark, the swifts amass

above Chapman School in a huge spiral formation and fly into the chimney to roost,

giving the impression of an avian whirlpool. Vox's swifts have been roosting in the Chapman

School furnace chimney since 1982. Because of their concern for the birds, the students and staff

decided not to turn on the furnace and endured many chilly days until the swifts left the chimney

and continued on their southern migration. So this is swifts.

It is said they are in a dream state, swinging two and from the chimney in pattern chaos,

like stars, swirling and dissipating like tides of dust. A crowd gathers, all eyes turned on

the sky. On this behavior upon which we humans have no bearing, booing when a hawk swoops through

the cloud of our small dark shapes, clapping when the last one has punished into the smoke stack.

For thirty nights still dance and then continue southward. All we can do is watch.

We watch in the birds' swirl, splaying into something beyond magic, like seafoam,

high above our picnic blankets, our beer bottles, our chatter, our attempts to ascribe

some mythology to this phenomenon. So little now is sacred, so little is easy.

Tomorrow I will return to a place where someone destroyed a soft feathered part of myself,

I offered them. There was no mercy, no reverence. Tonight that part murmurs in the sky like a

whirlpool, then dives down into the nests of ten thousand boxes swifts. Tonight there is a soft

stunned applause.

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