Aeronauts

When I remember how we began, love, 

I picture the white-throated swift

born of craggy canyons out west

aerialist acrobat


who eats, drinks, courts

even mates

in dizzying flight:


Two swifts meet on high   

link in an avian embrace

and plummet in one

feather-light tumble

as the green valley

hurtles close


then the birds unclasp

and catch themselves

on scimitar wings

righting their bodies mid-air.


Love, we are not devil-may-care

but the earth fell away

when we first touched.

I’m still plunging the vaulted blue.

Wendy Kagan writes in a converted barn in the Catskill Mountain foothills, preferably with a cup of creamy British tea in front of a roaring wood stove. Her poems have appeared in ONE ART, Eunoia Review, The Ekphrastic Review, and elsewhere. Her chapbook Blood Moon Aria was long-listed for the Yellow Arrow Publishing 2024 chapbook competition and is forthcoming from Red Bird Chapbooks. More at wendykagan.com.