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Merry Jul 2018
The Black Swan enchants the funeral march
Dancing on a mirror
I stand and watch from the mire
She is elegance and grace

The White Swan dispels the misery
With arrogance dire
He spreads his wings
And unfurls his lies

He speaks of heaven and paradise
Whilst black feathers condemned
To brimstone and hellfire
For death is evil

But the Black Swan
She dances on
The natural course of life
Is unto death, after all

I step onto the lake
Sinking into the aching feelings
With mud and water at my ankles
I stare out into the abyss

The swans dance
Like ballerinas
Eternal
And I break the mirror

Clean, pristine and without error
The still water breaks
Ripples and ripples
Natural discordance in the halcylon realm

I turn my back
On the funeral march
The dreary procession
Ignoring black wings

I turn myself
Onto the dancer before me
She smiles, serene,
And offers condolences

The Black Swan
And the White Swan
Continue their dance
And I continue my staring
Meg Howell Mar 2018
Fragile hands,
Weathered and cracked,
Grasping onto the neck of the swan
They are tough,
Yet, all the while, their reach is gentle,
And they glide with the swan to the pond’s lively middle

Up

Up they go

   Ricocheting off the dancing beads of
      water
    
       doing the tango,
          
         the salsa,

            and, at last,

               ballroom.
Lyn-Purcell Sep 2017
Lovers by the lake
Fragrant scent of loving grace
Swans fly with sweet cries
© Poem by Lyn-Purcell
Bisaal Jun 2017
as the swan dances through the sky
I whisper
'you fly in your freedom,
as happy as can be
and here I sit
wishing someone to set me free'.

and as the cage around me
erupts in flames
the swan answers
'i have freed you,
but never forget:
no one is ever completely free
it is simply imagination,
you see'.
Jim Davis Mar 2017
When black swans sleeping
After the dark, lonely night
Awake to the light

© 2017 Jim Davis
My first attempt at a Haiku. After I wrote it, and then researching swans and their symbolism I found this;

"Swan Color Meanings
White swans in dreams are symbolic of cleansing and purifying ourselves and our lives. Black swans indicate deep mysteries within us that are longing to be set free to express themselves creatively - perhaps as Bridgid would have us do, in poetry or music."
Link not allowed

There is also the "Black swan Theory"; "A  event or occurrence that deviates beyond what is normally expected of a situation and is extremely difficult to predict; the term was popularized by Nassim Nicholas Taleb, a finance professor, writer and former Wall Street trader. Black swan events are typically random and are unexpected."
beth fwoah dream Jan 2017
sea, soft slumbering
its ghosts green nettles
once woven into shirts,
princess with fingers
badly stung
for love you sew
nettle to poison nettle
bearing the pain
for brotherly love
and as the nettle shirts
are thrown over their
backs, they become
human once more
and the bonfire to burn you
becomes soft flowers,
under a wintery sky that was once
a flock of wild swans.
Norman dePlume Jan 2016
Should it come to this, without remorse? Like that orange, feeble
and deciduous, while we waited with binoculars through that gray on gray
afternoon for the owl to spread its wings. Perhaps it did, past dusk,
behind the trees, under those vaguely baleen-formed clouds.

The clouds cast shadows on other clouds, as if holding them up against reality, even for our affirmation. Did you think of me this morning, over your Life cereal, and did you miss the fruit?  The “organic wholeness?” What is the determinant thing that dissolves?

The dissolution of the self-contradictory comes from the dissolution of the determinant thing. Arguments formed in apartments over a bowl of cherries or a bowl of ****, or some such. Loss of a determinate thing (under Article 1262, par. 1.) is the equivalent of impossibility of performance in obligations to do referred to in Article 1266. We are left with the form of a bowl, perhaps a ginger bowl, or some form of lost lacquer.

The distinct lack of skyscrapers from SoHo up through Chelsea was said to be a function of Manhattan bedrock. But modern materials seem to have overcome that problem. Getting on the subway, he heard someone say “…as if each word is born with another word, and spends its life on lines looking for the perfect rhyme". "You know they mate for life," he thought, "the swans. If one is killed, the other often dies of boredom.”
(c) 2016. This started as another Ashbery parody, but once Hegel wormed his way in, I took out all the line breaks and flarfed it up a bit.
Seán Mac Falls Jun 2015

*Gentle water lord,
Four seasons show in your graces:

Breezy spring, wafts, leaves so soon,
Lost loves, colours longing for white,
Light jewel.

Hottest summer, moves, in sleepy
Sun, all her ways soothed, running,
Milky days.

Autumn shakes of mellow webbing
Leaf as you arrive, majesty's thief,
Gliding lithe.

Frozen winter, low, pure and pale,
Never demure, as your wings aloft,
Flake so fair.
I used to think the swans would live
Until the world no longer spun.
And that they could live forever and a day
And bask out in the sun.
Even the ugly duckling; who soon learnt his fate,
Doesn't have an end or a sell-by date.

Now, as we know, things come and go.
And beauty fades and falls.
But I used to believe that swans could go
And out live us all.

I see white feathers, of purity and of clean.
And I watch them move so graceful and ever so serene.
The swans, they dance and glide across the lake's wide top.
And will always do so, even when my heart stops.

Where do swans go to die?
I hear my teacher ask.
I don't really know, I replied.
I never thought to ask.
But I wish to see a dead one, just to believe that it can be so.
But I don't think I could cope with that, if one died near me though.

Swans can't die, I tell myself as I sit here by the lake...

The lake that holds no movement
For all the swans have gone.
But I do not understand,
What in their life went wrong.

Where do swans go to die?
A better place, I bet.
But in the next life, with those swans,
How much better could it get?
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