We didn’t pay that much heed to planes, those jet streams toing & froing at Dublin Airport. Da taught us to keep nix, watch birds for their covert flight paths on warm shafts of seasonal winds and late daylight over Finglas. The cuckoo, Hera’s bird, announced each late spring. Swifts scudded, courted above the Tolka’s root-ivy summer. Corncrakes in Darcy’s side-garden scurried and secreted autumn. Out at Dollymount, the Brent geese wing-spanned an ivory wintertime. The finches’ rise and fall – their hard flap, all that graft for a long easy glide. We learned the most from the home place’s birds. Our old feathered banner: the ravens. How they mastered gravity vectors, omnivore feeding, prey-dodging and cloud-top scaling. They could sense a shift in a skyscape or how a brattling rainstorm may wreck the memory map back to the hatchling, nestling, fledgling grounds. Our ravens always returning to that magnetic place. We heard wingbeats. Gazed up. Ravens flocked. Their sudden soaring over our estate, out beyond Finglas.