A flamingo is supposed to be pink, and the first thing the speaker of "White Flamingo" tells us is that she isn't. The poem is spoken by the bird itself, and it opens on a picture of awkward visibility: "I stand alone, / With backward bended knees." A flamingo's leg really does seem to fold the wrong way, so the poem starts with a body that looks odd before any feeling is named. The oddness is something others can see from a distance. That is why the next line, "Their eyes on me, / Just because I'm different," reads like a complaint made in the middle of being watched.
The speaker then reaches for a story everyone knows. "The ugly duckling" appears in quotation marks, as if the bird is borrowing a ready-made name for her situation. "I feel his pain... / I know his despair" shows she doesn't quite claim the tale as her own. She feels *with* the duckling. The ellipsis after "pain" leaves a pause where the hurt sits unspoken. This is the low point, and it is built from very short lines with almost no decoration.
The middle of the poem works through contrast in the water. Other birds, presumably the pink ones, are imagined in a scene of movement and colour: "The waters glisten of pink... / As they dance on the lillies." Around the speaker the water is "deadstill." The word "deadstill," run together as one, sounds flat and heavy, and it makes her isolation physical. Her stillness suits a flamingo's standing posture, but here it also means being left out. The pink water belongs to those who belong.
Then the poem turns on a change of sky. "I see it coming through the dark skies" is the first time she looks outward instead of at the eyes on her, and the ordinary rhythm breaks into excitement: "Here it comes ... / The light ! , The warmth !" The spaced exclamation marks and stray comma look rough on the page, but they give the sense of someone too eager to punctuate neatly. Light and warmth are the opposite of the dark sky and dead water, and they land on the one thing that could not be pink. Her whiteness, which was a flaw, now catches the glow and becomes "My angelic shine."
The ending is where the poem differs most from the fable it borrows. The ugly duckling is accepted once he grows into a swan. The flamingo does not change at all. The only thing that changes is how the light falls on her, so difference is not cured but revalued. Her verbs also move from passive to active. She begins by being looked at and ends by acting: "I steal their attention !" The verb "steal" is revealing. She doesn't earn admiration gently. She takes it, and that gives her triumph a slightly defiant edge.
The final line, "The water is mine !", fits that edge. It echoes the earlier picture of pink water belonging to the others, and she now claims it as her own. It also gives the poem its only clear rhyme: "shine" and "mine" sit two lines apart. Until then the poem is free verse with only faint echoes, such as "knees" and "me," or "eyes" and "skies." The rhyme arrives when the speaker finally feels settled, so the sound of the poem resolves along with its mood. One could ask whether this is healing or just a reversal. The speaker wants to outshine the crowd, not to be accepted by it. The poem doesn't resolve that question, but the imbalance is part of what makes the voice feel human.
What makes the poem worth reading is how much it does with so little. It takes a well-worn story about being an outcast and tests it against a different bird, a different setting and a different ending. Its quiet argument is that being different isn't something to fix. It may just be waiting for the right light.