A bird flew far
from a tree to my window
a withered tree,
a lifeless tree
It struggled to fly
with one of its wings clipped
How? How?
How did it
manage to fly?
It kept pecking
at my window
Every morning I
would wake up to the noise
I looked at it
from my bed
struggling to
get up
I would look at
it as it stopped pecking
We locked eyes,
quite a few times
each time I
would look away with an urgency
Fear, there was
an inexplicable fear
there were
unspoken stories
radiating
through the window
I dared not open
the window
Scared, if I
open it,
the bird,
it’ll vanish
or ask me to
unclip its wing
it might ask me
to pet it
to trust it
to let it in
it might even ask
me to get up from the bed, when it’s hard to do so
only to not be
there the next day to do the same
What if it asks
me to look it in the eyes and not look away?
and just when I
get used to it,
it asks me to
let it go…
I got tired,
tired of the
questions
I opened the
window, looked it in the eyes
unclipped its
wing, took it in my hands
Silence,
deafening Silence
complete
surrender on both parts
I asked it to
fly away
it wouldn’t
it circled back
in my hands
then sat again
near the window, unbothered
An open blue sky
a bird free to
fly
but rests near
my window instead
when I touched
its unclipped wing
it turned back
looked me
straight in the eye
then flew away, still
struggling
as if it forgot
how to fly without one of its wings clipped
Up it went in
the sky, slowly, fearfully
I woke up again the
next morning
at the pecking
noise
a bird with one
of its wings clipped
a different bird
this time
each time
every morning
it’s like a
ritual now,
letting these
birds fly
Until one day
they all come back,
rest near my
window and ask
What will you do
with us now?
What do we do
with this freedom?
How do we make
sense of a world without struggle?
How do we fly fearlessly
without anything holding us back?
