Swans
Everyone deserves a childhood that's green
I’m back in my hometown of Fayetteville, New York for a few days. Every time I’m here I’m struck by what a beautiful place it was to grow up. Not a perfect one—as a relatively well-to-do suburb, there is plenty of the usual moral rot and indifference to, if not outright championing of, suffering at home and abroad—but it is beautiful.
By beautiful I mostly mean green. I grew up in, under, and around trees, as did those of my peers lucky enough not to be so wealthy as to live in the newest McMansion developments on top of the bare, razed hilltops on the southern end of our district. (I’m sorry that the disgust keeps leaking out of me even as I try to write about something beautiful. There’s still a lot to love. Back to the trees.)
There are many I’ve fallen in love with over the years: the oak a block from our house whose acorns I would fill my pockets with and admire, the Douglas-firs that form the windbreak beside the middle school bus garage. The Norway spruce I planted as a seedling in our backyard in first grade, which some thirty years later has grown to what must be sixty feet tall, and in which untold jays and crows and cardinals and mourning doves now socialize. Just this morning, on my walk to the coffee shop, I noticed by my dad’s house a crown-cropped tree that is now growing upward in four separate compass pointed trunks where they depart from the terminus of the original.
To the extent I have a point it’s that everyone deserves a childhood this green. A childhood where birdsong and insect hum are everpresent, nurtured by the unending creep of the forest. Shaded sidewalks, real parks. A chance to be outside in a living and healthy world. For days I have thought of little but the children of Iran buried in the rubble of the school that my country has destroyed. For years I have thought of little but the children of Palestine buried in the rubble of the nation that my country has destroyed. Horrors beyond comprehension, but not mythic ones: horrors made right here at home by people who cannot see that every child is a universe unto itself. That everyone deserves a childhood as green as my own.
I’m out of ideas, out of answers. These days I mostly send money to whomever I can and write poems. Here’s one I wrote about the town next to the one where I grew up. It’s not free from horrors but the horrors are perhaps the right size to hold in a human heart, instead of whatever all the rest of this is. I hope you enjoy it.
Swans
The neighboring town was named
For the general who heard and was saved
By the cackle of geese. Manlius —
His name, and the town’s.
Geese there are everywhere, the town,
And less sacred than the swans, white jewels
Or perhaps the finery on which jewels are laid.
Black eyes, long necks, regal repose. They drift
Like clouds across centerpiece ponds.
One night so cold you could crack the sky
By tapping the stars I saw them there,
Heads buried in breasts, great necks
Folded politely from sight. They merged
With the clouds of my breath and I thought
We must keep ourselves warm
In the void, even if mated for life.
That year their eggs were smashed by a drunk
Full of lonely courage, rage coursing in
Labbattical veins. Caught quick, having bragged
Before to other barflies about the birds
He’d punish for their lives.
When they named the town they weren’t thinking
Of how every egg must break some time.
Only of the name, and the glory of swans.
Thanks, as always, for reading. I’ll talk to you next time.
-Chuck
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