Swoop

Swoop

On a pallid morn when the distant hills wear their mist‑clad cloaks, the air is slick with a promise of swift, unspoken rites. No lullaby but the faint rattle of the Robin‑hood of memory, of wind‑speaking leaves that rustle in the foot‑path of the moor.

The bird – a black‑winged fulsome of Red‑Skies, a plume of night‑metal against the canvas of a late‑afternoon sun – rises from the rustling thicket, the world stretching like a mare’s haunches pending the command of a chequered battle.

She cradles the horizon in a hinge of power and, unsullied by earthly tethers, she sods the stratum of sky.
A single, mercurial turn: the wing‑ship spirals, the wing‑tip adorns the cloud like a fencer’s gambit, and the atmosphere beneath ripples – a nearly invisible vortex that invites the unseen.

All that remains, as she descends, is the idea of velocity in motion, that fleeting hand‑shake between being and becoming. She collides with the earth unseen, her talons a fleeting remnant of promise, as the earth rises with her.

There – in that moment – is the true swoop, an unspeakable trust that the world once more may bend and swallow and become something new and deadly at the same time – a cryptic footnote in the grand English pageantry of nature.

And when she is gone, all that lingers is the echo of thunder beneath the road, the sweet silence of the mighty flight and the faint desire that, sometime, we might also take a quiet, swooping plunge into the unknown.