THE SWAN BY THE DUMPSTER

by Hattie Ellis (Salisbury)

There was a swan by a dumpster with a red rat hole in its flank. He couldn’t bury the bird in the trash. So it lay in his mind. A swan, so vast in air or water, was suddenly small without breath. Its unresolved, unburied presence grew.

I should have gone back the next day; I should have buried the swan. Its stilled, empty beauty became a new shape; neither alive nor passed on. Who does not have such regrets; actions not taken; problems not solved; chances replayed, beyond reach?

He told of the swan in a poem. The group heard its beauty and the ache of the irresolvable. He wanted to finish it off. But the poem was already alive in the air; the dead swan had the breath of his words. Poetry doesn’t need answers. It just is.

The group listened. The power of good poems, or stories, is they let us inhabit them. We enter into them like houses; imagine their fabric and live with images that, through experience or without known cause, we understand better, one day, now or later.

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What Hattie Ellis says about THE SWAN BY THE DUMPSTER:

The Kingfisher Project is a literature and health project run by Salisbury Arts Centre and ArtCare, based at Salisbury District Hospital. The poet-in-residence is Rose Flint, who often gets people to think about nature, both as a rich means of inspiration and as a way of looking outwards at the world. I sat in on a community writing group as they came up with a few dozen words they associated with animals and then each wrote a poem, including one about a dead swan. The last part of the story comes from a conversation I had with the Precentor of Salisbury Cathedral, Canon Jeremy Davies, who talked about why powerful stories and poems are powerful. I’ve quoted his words almost verbatim.