1
When I was a child I wore a crown,
golden, gleaming and grave,
unruly, wild, a thicket and mane,
a nest where swifts made their home.
Whenever they rose, I rose with them.
Mouth agape and head flung back,
raptured, I followed their effortless course.
I saw their gambols and plummeting dives.
Didn’t they swoop from the skies
straight into my hair?
I shared with them both eye and heart,
their hovering in the wind.
The reckless world, both
shrinking and widening as we ascended.
At one time ecstatic and shrill,
then soft with a raspy voice
I spoke with them: sree-sree.
I learned from them the strangest words
– like borderless, vastness –
that nobody quite understood at home.
I was the one who would speak to the birds
and wouldn't conform,
punching bag, puncher,
the difficult child,
who wouldn't sleep at quiet time
and wouldn't sleep at night,
when summer light still for hours on end
shone boredom on my bed,
meanwhile the parents, finally free,
sat next door discussing their lives.
Neighbours eyed curtains suspiciously,
as kids in the yard did the dreamer.
He wants to fly, spreading his arms
like we're keen to give him a hug,
yet beating wildly with fledgling wings
to everyone's mockery.
Alley of cat-calls: There is the freak!
Jeering, they flung what the older ones thought
straight into the outsider's face.
I levelled a rifle made out of thin air,
aimed straight and shot at them all.
They merely laughed retorted in rage:
We'll make you pay, just you wait!
I ran and fled to the uppermost branch
of the chestnut in front of our house
and, from my magic circle of leaves,
summoned the birds from the dream-nest.
I wanted to soar with them up to the heights
and sentence the mockers below,
rejoicing as I cruised to worlds
beyond which, ant-small,
they'd vanish from sight.
When our mother saw that sunburst of hair,
the pomelo amidst a German tree’s green,
her cry rang out like a swift’s sharp shriek,
as if the disaster had already struck,
and her life had just ended with me.
Too timid to trust me.
She too couldn't see my wings.
I had practised at night,
when no one would watch – in my dreams,
lifting my feet off the ground with more ease.
When sometimes I barely rose,
if only for seconds,
my mother’s hands pulled me back down.
No way could I carry us both.
That's how it went on for years, correct?
I wandered from strangeness to strangers,
to streets and cities unknown,
the leash of childhood drawn taut.
And always staring behind …
Talking inwardly, silent without –
that wasted our lives away.
We sat once more in a chestnut tree's shade.
Gasping, I'd shifted her cumbersome bed
from the hospice porch onto the lawn.
The grandchildren romped. She smiled wearily.
Autumn light broke through the swaying leaves,
casting pale amber flecks
on her pillow and face.
Do you remember the day,
she asked,
when you dangled high up in the tree?
Oh – yes.
The lightest of breezes,
she said,
could have plucked you away …
The swift was a baker's daughter.
Who would have ever thought?
Where I once sat,
I told her, I will
never be found there again.
In the night when she died,
I slept soundly and rose,
unburdened up,
and no one kept hold of my hands.