"The Halo That Would Not Light" by Lucie Brock-Broido

This poem is telling a story of somebody's childhood which was filled with emptiness.  This person has undergone great tragedy throughout his life.  The poem has a bunch of fancy imagery in it.  Most of it is related to birds.  A "raptor" drops the subject in the first stanza "like a finch" into a "nest."  Then the wind is "hover-hunting", which after some research I learned is a tactic used by some raptors to catch prey.  The linden leaves mentioned in the fourth stanza of course come from linden trees which many small birds nest in.  The third stanza speaks of "red scarves silking endlessly from a magician's hollow hat" which is used in a simile for how the swings are going back and forth by themselves.  The last two lines talk about somebody's endless childhood ending.  The poet is trying to say that childhood is just as hollow as the magicians hat.  We pretend to pull things out of it like the red scarves but they really mean nothing because the hat is still empty.  As for the birds in the first half of the poem, the poet talks about finches which are known to not take care and abandon their young.  The child talked about in this poem was abandoned and, therefore, condemned to have a hollow childhood.