The beating of a swallow’s wings,

A stone jar poised as if to fall,

A fierce and unforgiving sun

That beats upon a whitewashed wall

That finds and tracks each human flaw

And reads the writing in the dust

Of broken hopes and powdered dreams

And love reclassified as lust.

Where images of shameful death

Describe a life defined by blame,

The beatings of a swallow’s wings

Above a place of public shame

Are like the barest breath of grace

That stir the unforgiving air:

That shift the gaze and lead the eye

Beyond the camera’s fatal stare

To where one writes within that dust

Of dry bones in a bone-dry place,

Of broken hopes and powdered dreams -

The unseen, unhoped, words of grace

Which free accuser and accused 

Which spell out how our life begins;

A motion like a breath of grace:       

The beating of a swallow’s wings.

(‘Writing in the Dust: The Men Taken in Hypocrisy’ by Roger Wagner)

Roger Wagner’s painting, to which this poem is an accompaniment, sets the scene in a concrete arena, a bleak prison-like space characterized by an almost monochrome palette.

An earlier version of this painting, from 2013, has a warmer sandy-yellow tone in both ground and figures’ robes, as well as including the green of palm trees in the now-empty background sky.

Arena or prison: both are manmade institutions for judgement, the poverty and harshness of whose processes are foregrounded here. The latter is a corrective facility for criminals; the former a place of spectacle and public scrutiny whose shifting forms traverse both the ancient Roman circus and the ubiquitous screens of modern media. In this painting, phone and film cameras are held aloft alongside machine guns in a veritable shooting gallery along the bottom edge.

This hardened world is the one where the ‘breath of grace’ swoops in almost unnoticed in the figure of the swallow. A symbol in Renaissance painting of Christ’s resurrection, the swallow’s appearance in the spring in Europe was understood to herald new life. In a moment of unexpected appearing, Wagner’s swallow—on canvas and in verse—is a figure for grace. The surprise of its gratuitous appearance in a situation apparently without grace is like the interruption of historical time by a kairos, a moment charged with transformative possibility. Like the barest tufts of grass near Jesus’s finger, life irrepressibly stirs when condemnation stops.