Metamorphosis Asterism

When I wrote this poem, I was thinking about the Neolithic night sky in Scotland and how important the swan was to ancient people. I had just been to Orkney and one day had watched two swans paddling at the Stones of Stenness in a kind of awe: time had collapsed around me. I was also thinking somewhat of the Mesolithic Danish Vedbaek burial uncovered in 1975, where they discovered the bones of a small child laid on a swan’s wing next to its mother. Swans were liminal water birds that could fly in the air, swim and float on water, and walk on land. Also, I love to think how change and metamorphosis drove these people’s conception of the world. How their questions could have been imaginatively answered without science.