What the Potter Knows

The way water bends the stem
of the daffodil as you
look through the vase
to the window where
the yard has suddenly
filled with birds––the doves
who only eat seeds
from the ground, and clouds
of sparrows who move together
suddenly like the ripples that
form on water after you
throw the stone––

Believe it––there is a different way
to know and see.

The woman with clay
in her hands and the sea
in her eyes knows more
than the man who believes
the daily kaleidoscope
of numbers spooling across
the screens are what to be
banking on. She spins
the wheel, a tale not
of woe, in spite of it all. Watch
as the birds return and return to her
as she bends down briefly
to touch the head of a violet
rising from the uneven ground.

*

Your Grandfather Loved Birds My Mother Said

In the dark, he’d wake his daughters
and lead them to the pickup truck,
hand them hot cocoas,
and drive them to the edge
of the arboretum to find birds
they didn’t know the names of
that he needed like stitches
to hold his day together, bright bits
of halcyon beauty.

This, rather than fold
under the weight of the war
he’d endured while the others
in his ski troup died in the same
room he had to hide in to
survive. So many days with
their bodies disappearing until
finally someone came for him.

As girls, they did not
understand this need
to get there at first light
to hear that fabric of song.
Years later, when they poured
bird seed into feeders to
invite the brightness, the flight,
the miracles, they understood:

It is worth it,
despite the horror,
to be alive another day.

*

Heather Swan is a poet and nonfiction writer. Her poems have appeared in such journals as The Hopper, ONE ART, Terrain, Poet Lore, Phoebe, The Raleigh Review, and Cold Mountain. Her most recent collection Dandelion was released from Terrapin Books in 2023. Her first book, A Kinship with Ash (Terrapin Books), published in 2020, was a finalist for both the ASLE Book Award and the Julie Suk Award. Her nonfiction book Where Honeybees Thrive (Penn State Press) won the Sigurd F. Olson Nature Writing Award. A companion book, Where the Grass Still Sings: Stories of Insects and Interconnection, was just released in May 2024. She has been the recipient of the August Derleth Poetry Award, the Wisconsin Fellowship of Poets Best Chapbook Award, the Wisconsin Center for the Book Bookmark Award, the Martha Meyer Renk Fellowship in Poetry at UW Madison, and an Illinois Arts Council Poetry Fellowship Award. She teaches environmental literature and writing at UW Madison.