THE SWAN

You know that feeling when you’re just… there, watching life go on around you? Everyone else seems to be moving, loving, belonging, while you’re standing still, holding everything inside. That’s what this poem is. It’s me saying what most of us don’t say out loud that sometimes love is silent, unseen, and it hurts in a way you can’t even name. It’s about those nights you cry and nobody notices, the pages you turn looking for some sign of yourself, the pieces of you you leave behind hoping someone will find them. This isn’t some perfect Shakespeare kind of love; it’s messy, brackish, raw. But it’s real. And if you’ve ever loved someone quietly, or felt invisible in your own story, or carried a grief you couldn’t explain, then this is your lake too. This is your Swan.

I may not be the Shakespeare of this time,

Maybe not even Jane Austen in the newness of this shifting rhyme,

But I am the Swan of this vast, endless lake

The lake where I watch other swans entwined,

Their wings brushing, their reflections merging,

While I remain alone, feathers trembling in the brackish whirlpools.

The water here tastes of all the salt I’ve swallowed,

And the fishes are the only witnesses to it,

Their silent eyes reflecting the ache that coils in my chest.

I may not be the poet for your weeping night,

But I am the poem you will stumble upon again,

When exhaustion from your own tears makes you pause,

When the weight of your nights leaves you hollow,

And you open a page you didn’t know existed,

And there, between the lines, everything has always been waiting for you.

Maybe I am not the Shakespeare who will kneel in sonnets at your door,

Maybe not even Jane Austen who will dress our pain in gilded words,

But I am the Swan of this unseen, unclaimed love,

Floating through waters thick with memory and longing,

Knowing that time will swallow me whole,

And yet leaving behind a feather caught in a lonely whirlpool

A remnant of what I was, of what I could not give,

While the fishes below, like mournful historians,

Trace the salt of my tears,

Carving a map of a love that was never fully mine,

A deadly, beautiful lake where I drowned in silence,

Where grief became my reflection,

And solitude my only companion.

— Ana Swan