What the Mute Swans Told Me 🦢
on this terrible waxing moon 🌔
Text within this block will maintain its original spacing when publishedWalking at Night Beside the Little Sea(*)
Mute swans call in darkness
between explosions. Fizz-Boom-Crackle--
Bonfire Night fireworks detonate.
Sulphurous clouds drift over
a sybilline chorus of swan honk,
amplified as if on a looper pedal.(**)
Long-necked shadows pass
over light-scored lochan.(***)
They sing to each other:
Not alone, Never alone, Not ever.
I originally wrote this poem the day after the US elections, put down in fragments on IG as stories that disappear after 24 hours. After sleeping on it, I realised I didn’t want the poem to disappear; I am sharing it here.
*The Peedie Sea is all that remains of a vast loch—I live on what was once its expansive banks. Peedie means small in Orcadian.
** A looper pedal is a device that allows sections of music to repeat. Phrases can be layered in cyclical and meditative accumulation, as in the music of Sieben.
Or in this one-man-band cover of The-Equals-via-The-Clash ‘Police on My Back’ by Fred Armisen.
***Lochan means small loch in Scots
