The swans of St. Patrick's Day #phenology

This St. Patrick's Day morning the Better Half returned from doing some errands and kicked me out of the house. Actually, she told me that the Sunrise River pools were covered in swans and I should go take some pictures. She was right. Never before in my life have I seen so many swans in one place at one time. Below are a couple of the results. But first, let me add that I had been considering W. B. Yeats' The Wild Swans at Coole in honor of the Irish and the swans. Yeats' poem is set in October, not early Spring, so we went and found a different poems about swans, this one published in The Irish Times. The swans we saw this morning are tundra swans and we didn't hear whooping and there were, as you can see, many, many more than two, but all in all we came close enough for today's poem.

St. Patrick's Day: swans at the Sunrise River pools

Photo by J. Harrington

St. Patrick's Day: swans at the Sunrise River pools

Photo by J. Harrington

In a related event, while taking the pictures we heard, but did not see, a red-winged blackbird. Spring is here. No, we hadn't any thought of dyeing the swans green in honor of the day. But we will share an Irish blessing with you because, as we know, these days we can all use all the help we can get.

May the road rise to meet you,
and the wind always be at your back.
May the sun shine warm on your face
and the rains fall softly on your fields.
And until we meet again
May God hold you gently in the palm of his hand.

Two Ivory Swans

Moya Cannon

Two Ivory Swans

fly across a display case

as they flew across Siberian tundra

twenty thousand years ago,

heralding thaw on an inland sea,

their wings, their necks, stretched, stretched

vulnerable, magnificent.

Their whooping set off a harmonic

in someone who looked up,

registered the image

of the great journeying birds

and, with a hunter-gatherer’s hand

carved their tiny white likenesses

from the tip of the tusk

of the greatest of all land-mammals,

wore them for a while,

or traded or gifted them

before they were dropped down time’s echoing chute,

to emerge, strong-winged,

whooping,

to fly across our time.

The British Museum, April, 2013

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