Alice Mackenzie Swaim: Blossoms of Courage and Remembering

October 22, 1911

On this day, the Scottish-American poet Alice Mackenzie Swaim was born — a voice of quiet resilience whose verses shimmer with both strength and tenderness.

Though she would make her home in Pennsylvania, her heart forever circled back to the heathered hills and windswept coasts of her native Scotland.

Of her homeland, she wrote with aching beauty:

My soul still, returns like a bird to its nest
To those distant islands
Eternally blest,
Where poet and seer and lover are one
And life a new challenge Beneath an old sun.

One can almost feel the salt air in those lines — that longing flight of memory over sea and moor. Swaim carried her Scotland within her, a living landscape of spirit and solace.

When periods of illness confined her as a young mother, poetry became both comfort and courage. She turned frailty into grace, her pen summoning the strength her body sometimes could not.

That steadfast gentleness blooms most memorably in her beloved verse:

“Courage is not the towering oak that sees storms come and go; it is the fragile blossom that opens in the snow.”

Ah, but what a gardener’s truth that is!

Courage, in its truest form, is not grand or immovable but delicate, persistent — a violet defying frost, a bud insisting on bloom despite the cold.

Swaim teaches us that endurance can wear the face of softness. The blossom, not the oak, becomes her emblem of hope.

Her poetry often rested within the intimate garden of memory, where love and loss intertwined like old vines.

In her poem For My Remembering, she wrote:

I need no rosemary nor rue
for my remembering,
No faded flower, no lock of hair,
Not even spring.

When all the wind is your sweet voice
And all the rain, your tears,
There's no way of forgetting
Immortal, radiant years.

What delicate mourning — a grief wrapped in light.

To the gardener’s ear, her imagery feels familiar: memory as fragrance, love as the season that never ends.

She reminds us that the past, like perennial roots, lies unseen yet ever alive beneath the present bloom.

And then there is her perfect haiku — a moment of stillness distilled into breath:

Old garden chair
sagging with the weight
of a single leaf.

Winner of the 1994 Henderson Memorial Haiku Award, it is a picture so simple, yet profound — the humble chair, the solitary leaf, and the quiet ache of time passing.

Swaim saw the garden not merely as nature’s theater but as a mirror of the soul: tender resilience, beautiful decay, enduring grace.

So today, let us honor Alice Mackenzie Swaim — the poet who found courage in blossoms, eternity in memory, and poetry in the falling of a leaf.

May her words remind us that gentleness, too, is a kind of strength, and that even in stillness, life continues to bloom.