Pigeon woman (Love story inspired by May Swenson) (2023) Painting by Peter Duhaj

Story about the painting:

"Poetry is not only excellent relaxation for me, but sometimes also a source of ideas for my creative imagination.
So is the poem Pigeon Woman by the famous American poet May Swenson.
While reading this strange story about a sick woman who went to feed the city pigeons every day at precisely 1:30 p.m. She cared for them and gave them her love. The story by May Swenson says that every person has their own story, everyone has the opportunity to feel the joy and pain of love, no matter what they look like or what situation they are in.
He points out that if we have something to give, love comes quickly, but it flies away from us just as quickly when we have nothing left to give.

Love can be warm like hugging those you care about, but it can also be cold like breaking up with a longtime lover.
Yes, sometimes love is pain...

So the painting tells the story of love (symbolized by red roses), which sometimes takes us to the clouds (blue eye), but sometimes brings us pain, wounds (a broken piece of wing, bloody wing, blood dripping from the mouth), from which we then have red eyes from crying (red eye )."


If you don't know this wonderful poem by May Swenson, you can read:

Slate, or dirty-marble-colored,
or rusty-iron-colored, the pigeons
on the flagstones in front of the
Public Library make a sharp lake

into which the pigeon woman wades
at exactly 1:30. She wears a
plastic pink raincoat with a round
collar [looking like a little

girl] and flat gym shoes,
her hair square-cut, orange.
Wide-apart feet carefully enter
the spinning, crooning waves

(as if she'd just learned how
to walk, each step conscious,
an accomplishment); blue knots in the
calves of her bare legs (uglied marble),

age in angled cords of jaw
and neck, her pimento-colored hair,
hanging in thin tassels, is gray
around a balding crown.

The day-old bread drops down
from her veined hand dipping out
of a paper sack. Choppy, shadowy ripples,
the pigeons strike around her legs.

Sack empty, she squats and seems to rinse
her hands in them--the rainy greens and
oily purples of their necks. Almost
they let her wet her thirsty fingers--

but drain away in an untouchable tide.
A make-believe trade

she has come to, in her lostness
or illness or age--to treat the motley

city pigeons at 1:30 every day, in all
weathers. It is for them she colors
her own feathers. Ruddy-footed
on the lime-stained paving,

purling to meet her when she comes,
they are a lake of love. Retreating
from her hands as soon as empty,
they are the flints of love.

Related themes

LovePigeonLove StorySymbolicFemale Face