BLACK SWAN,

Grounded Then Risen

Preface

This poem was written after the body resumed a language it had almost forgotten.

Recovery is not theatrical. It begins with weight returning, with the floor granting its old permissions. A small motion, repeated, until it becomes credible.

Black Swan belongs to a cycle concerned with return rather than rescue. It is less interested in illness than in what follows it: altered calculations of balance, trust, and duration.

The swan here is not ornamental. This is a poem about dancing only insofar as dancing is another way of standing.

-

I have come back to the floor
where wood remembers weight, where my 
feet
know grain the way we once knew words—
not perfectly, not as we once did.

Two years in the cage of my own bone.
I saw earth split open in places you’ll never map,
saw joy become a thing to bury deep
like seeds in burned ground. You let go,
but your shadow stayed—long as a neck
curved toward water that won’t hold a 
reflection.

Today I am barefoot. No swan’s white dress,
no wings sewn from tulle and hope.
I am black feather, oil-slick, moving
against the pull that kept me down—
gravity no longer a joke I could afford.

My hips stutter like gunfire I still dream,
my arms reach for you, then fold inward,
a question and its answer in the same breath.
I am not whole. I am what’s left
when the lake freezes and thaws and freezes 
again.

Each step is a small war I win,
each turn a letter I’ll never send.
This body was broken open like a border 
town,
but look how it bends.
I dance for what stayed,
for the swan that learned to walk
before it could fly again.

End Note

Black Swan was drafted during recovery and revised over several months. The poem remains close to the body, resisting narrative in favour of balance, pressure, and return.

The addressee is deliberately unstable. What matters is not the figure addressed but the space the body re-enters, one measured motion at a time.

This poem belongs to a longer sequence concerned with aftermath rather than crisis and with the slow reinstatement of ordinary movement.