A Hunchback Dreams of Swallows

Angela Cox, “The Last Swallow of Summer”

It’s been a heavy news week so here is some light verse from my father to end it with. As “gathering swallows twitter in the skies” (Keats, “To Autumn”), he dreams of flying south himself. I suspect that my father’s love of bird watching is tied up with his own longing to fly.

The hunchback in the poem who is frustrated with his earthbound existence reminds me of Milkman Dead in Toni Morrison’s Song of Solomon: 

When the little boy discovered, at four, the same thing Mr. Smith had learned earlier, that only birds and airplanes could fly, he lost all interest in himself.

In the lyrical imagination, however, all things are possible. Enjoy:

The Hunchback Who Thought He Was a Swallow

By Scott Bates

The Hunchback who thought he was a Swallow
Slept in the city dump
Under a green umbrella
With feathers on his hump

By gray Popocatepetls
Of fuming cinder piles
And seas of emerald bottles
And Goodrich Tire isles

The Hunchback who thought he was a Swallow
Dreamed of summer gone
To cloudbanks over Rio
And down the Amazon

To big Brazilian Beetles
On Green Umbrella Trees
And Butterflies like petals
Floating over seas

The Hunchback who thought he was a Swallow
Flew south over telephone poles
Over perpendicular People
With hunches on their souls

Over tall cathedral crosses
To the isles below the wind
To plane with Albatrosses
And others of his kind

A note on the artist: A number of fine bird paintings by Angela Cox can be found at featheronthebreeze.co.uk/25401.html.