Flyway
Susan McLean

Wild geese trace lines that overlap and merge
like fluid cursive scrawled across the sky,
honking in concert as their paths converge.
I barely can recall being that high,
that free, that restless, merely passing through
without a plan, just some inchoate drive
to find a place I didn’t know I knew,
one that I might not ever reach alive.

At college, I hear students in the halls,
greeting each other, grouping and diverging
before the flight on which they’re outward bound.
Their raucous chatter drowns my futile calls.
But why should they change course or heed the urging
of one who’s long been tethered to the ground?

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Susan’s notes: “For someone who spent most of my life (between the ages of five and sixty-five) in schools and colleges, first taking classes and then teaching them, I haven’t written much about schools. But teaching is an odd sort of life: you keep getting older and your students remain exactly the same ages. I taught in southwestern Minnesota, which lies in a major North American flyway, a migratory path for geese, ducks, and other waterfowl. Though I had seen vees of geese or ducks before in other parts of the country, in Minnesota in spring and fall, one could occasionally see waves of them, stretching as far as the eye could see. It was awe-inspiring. When it occurred to me that my students, like migratory fowl, were just passing through on their way to somewhere else, I started to write this poem. In writing it, I realized that in this metaphor I was like a domesticated goose calling out to the wild geese passing overhead. Of course they didn’t listen to me. What did I know about their lives? Yet I had once been one of them myself.

“This poem is a hybrid sonnet. The first stanza follows the rhyme scheme of the Shakespearean sonnet, and the second follows the rhyme scheme of the Petrarchan sonnet. It seemed an appropriate form to mirror the two stages of life it portrays. It first was published in the online journal The Chimaera and then appeared in my second poetry book, The Whetstone Misses the Knife.”

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Susan McLean is a retired English professor from Southwest Minnesota State University. She has published two poetry collections, The Best Disguise and The Whetstone Misses the Knife, and one book of translations of Latin poems by Martial, Selected Epigrams. Her third poetry book, Daylight Losing Time, is forthcoming from Able Muse Press.

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Flyway Susan McLean

Flyway
Susan McLean