My poem, “Hospice Swans,” is now available to read on the Months to Years journal website www.monthstoyears.org. To see it now, click on New Work, and then on the photo of swans. In about a month, it will appear in the online and print versions of the Fall 2021 issue.
It took me years to compose this poem and polish it to get it right. It is, of course, a true story from my Hospice days. I really did arrive for each of my nursing visits hoping to see the swans that the patient and her husband talked so much about. The land they owned was beautiful, as was their loving devotion to each other. The swans, obviously, became a metaphor for approaching death.
In crafting this poem I wanted to capture what it is like to wait for something unknown that was bound to arrive. And the swans that never came seemed like how quietly, beyond all our efforts, death descends, but unseen. I am so grateful to the editors of Months to Years for giving this poem a home — and for all the wonderful work they do to help others express the experience of passing in the ways most important and personal to them.