Poems by Becky Gibson
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Tundra Swans Wintering, Mattamuskeet
by Becky Gibson
A native of Carolina foothills, Becky now lives in sandy flats between the lower Cape Fear River and the Atlantic. She’s intrigued by the region’s waterfowl, especially the tundra swans at Lake Mattamuskeet where they pause every winter on their way north to breed.
Cold for February. Colder still as the sun goes down. Gold-tinged air, gold grasses fringing the canals. Water reflects sky in spectacular bands of color: robin’s egg blue, yolk-yellow, yellow-orange, hot pink cooling to magenta. We hear the swans before we see them—hundreds, maybe thousands, calling at once, and from all corners.
Plangent cries—haunting, insistent, utterly strange. No vowels I recognize. Are they calling kin, calling children? Do they know their child’s cry from every other? One by one, swans let down landing gear, glide to the lake’s surface. Paddle. Sleep afloat. Tip heads under to feed on roots, pondweed, wild celery. Loafing. Hanging out. Resting up for the naked journey north. Not all of them will make it.
Fresh clamor, nearby. Coming up hard to our right, a thrum of wings, more crying. Swans in formation arrow toward water, never breaking ranks. Eyes forward, they skim directly over us. We gaze up in awe at their luminous bellies, heavy and white. I’m astonished by their heft, the effort it must take to heave aloft such a body, much less carry it across continents.
The next morning, I learn that a friend in her eighties died the evening before, right as the Vee passed over. I’d not seen her for weeks. Though schooled by nuns, she’d brook no claptrap about death, not hers or anyone else’s. No afterlife, no heaven. Had she been among the swans sweeping down so close? If so, she did not reveal herself.
These are not angels but birds, big ones, caught in their own immanence, their own radical flesh. Yet, for the moment of their descent, they could be emissaries from another world. Spirit-dove coming to Mary, an incarnation. Do they know we’re here? Or does our being here not matter to them? No division between us on the ground and swans overhead. Their indifference to us the gift.
They fly on. The moment passes. Yet for that moment we’re no longer separate, alien. We too belong to earth, sky, water, every inch of space the swans describe with their path. Betsy left as she meant to, as she was prepared to do. Just as a swan knows where to go, how to get there, wingbeat by wingbeat, its feathers dipped in gold.
© Becky Gibson