The Swan(To Victor Hugo) Poem by Morgan Michaels

You, Andromache, who fed the river with your tears
and knew your grief reflected in the flood,
It's you this mock-Simois reminds me of
meandering along the

just completed square-
and my brain reels with memories.
The city we knew is gone-alas, the plan
of a town changes quicker than the mind of man!

Here was a barracks of uniformed men,
there, by those trees, a circus and some tents,
puddles where lawns and lawns where puddles, weren't,
all in a likeable crazy-quilt;

and over there- a zoo:
Once, as the day dawned, I saw
beneath a sky cold and bare-
and scoured by chastening winds

a swan, that escaping its hut,
padded the crushed stone,
Its gorgeous plumes brushing the ground,
and slipped into a waterless rut;

where, nervously dipping its wings in the dust,
(Recalling some primordial bay?) it
opened its beak to the sky and brayed
'Rain, when will you rain? Thunder, when sound? '.

Sometimes, heaven so fatally blue,
I see it again, that poor lost swan-
again, I hear its broken cry
sung to an infinitely empty sky.