‘Eala Dubh’ / ‘Black Swan’

Commissioned for Earagail Arts Festival 2021

I thought he was a dream, when first he came.

Haar had swept across the harbour from the mainland in the early light of morning when he arrived. Not real sea fog, of course; only my mind playing tricks on me in the summer’s soft pink dawning. In the moments before he sailed throughthe reeds, I saw the Northern Lights above the Swilly: moving like moths above the water; iridescent and full of nameless things.

They had told us this island would never see those folkloric green dancers, no matter how much we might pray to any we might choose. They had told us to let go of those lights. To make do with the sun and the stars and the moon. The light that we had been given. The light that we could take for our own.

He came with the fullest pink moon. He came with a force I had never known before. He came with stories I could never hope to find the words for, no matter how many times I circle around this sun. The other swans had wintered long and hard. He came with Spring embedded in the tips of his newly formed wings. He came with the world held inside his eyes.

In those days at the beginning, when I would talk to him; I would shout but in a whisper. Words trickling out like the first drops from a frozen waterfall, only just starting to thaw. I tried, and tried again, to find the ways to stop him from seeingthe insides of me, the broken and bruised bits; fallen brickafter the storms hit the ruined Castle; as old man winter stakes his claim.

I worried and I battled and I howled.

I wept and I fretted and I hid myself away.

And then, slowly, but with a great, unyielding force, I learned to be still and without preconception.

Softer and a bit more like the wren than the swan.

I suppose I learned how to wait, like these fields wait for the greylags.

I suppose I learned how to rest within the stillness, as the tides ebb and flow on this vast stretch of ancient shoreline, quietly.

I suppose I learned how to let go.

I suppose I learned how to trust.

He, meanwhile, remains the same- unchanged entirely but never the same in any given moment.

Island gift.

Black Swan.

Moon child.

Mostly made of milk; a sculpted swan – moving through the reeds like some god of borderless lands – right before my tired, grateful eyes. 

Who can even believe it, although I swear it to be true, that black swan has been on this island for six full weeks now? Visitors have come and gone; drawn to the thing they swore they’d never see; turning up in the year that was in it. Not quite sure what to say – how to find the words for such a creature – how to act around such a delicate, unbelievable thing. It has all become almost normal again – if such a word holds any real meaning at all, of course – any longer.

The shops have opened up again. The planes are in the skies again. The world is tilting on its axis again.

There is a black swan on Inch Island.

But what they do not tell you is that nothing will ever be the same again.

The beauty and the joy and all the light there never was before.

The way the waves are fiercer; the sea more hungry since he’scome along.

The way the island feels like somewhere you have never even once set foot.

The way the cow parsley holds itself in ways it never once did in those days before he came.

The way you are grieving for something you cannot quite locate, and you wonder if that something is your ghost.

The way your black swan looks at you right before sleep.

The way he smells.

The way he moves through the world like a song.

Hold your black swans close.

Keep them near as the skies above you both fill with whooper swans – arriving back to us all – the air heavy with the sounds of the marshes.

Sing to your black swans.

Teach them all the magic of this island: all her hushed wisdom and her unrivalled beauty.

Hold your black swans close, as long as they will let you.

Hold your black swans close; closer, still, on the hardest days of all.

Hold your black swans close.

The world will never be this new to them again.

Hold your black swans as close as memory, as close as thunder, as close as hope.

Hold your black swans close.

Hold your black swans close and sing to them.

Hold your black swans close, always.

Hold your black swans close, and sing to them, always.