Clipped Wings

Clipped Wings

(“If one part is suffering, then all the members suffer alongside it. If one member is honored, then all the members celebrate alongside it.” 1 Corinthians 12:26)

Someone had clipped the bird’s wings
and now he could not fly; not only for distance,
but for sheer folly and for time.
For more than a decade he simply hopped from
root too root underneath the trees where
the nests of cousins and brothers,
comrades and others,
settled in comfortably every Spring
and sang the songs that make men and gods smile.
He still could sing, but the tune never carried further
than the retaining walls around the yard.

Not only was his flight stolen, but the stumps of wings
were chronic wounds. He was not raised to be a stoic bird,
his voice was loud as a mockingbird. And time, and other time,
he wailed in his pain; a decade of catching the wind had been
removed from him.

At first the others, sorry for his loss, spoke to him from the
safety of their branches and offered sorrow, lozenges and prayer.
They would say he did not look in pain,
and that his wings were as beautiful as ever before. He wore
them high off his back as often as he could, but cried once night
shrouded him from the view of the mothers and their fledglings.
His singing stopped after no one listened anymore, but
crying, that awful sound that comes from a bird that is hurting,
cracked the midnight more often than the annual flocks imagined.

Each spring they began again, “How is your pain today? Have you
tried flying upside down? Have you tried seeds instead of worms?
And why don’t we see you at our morning gatherings to chirp at
the sun?” And then they would say, almost every day, for almost
an entire decade, “And we will pray for you.”

Agony takes its toll upon the most remarkable birds,
the eyes shrink to black, the legs wobble like toothpicks,
and the song is undiscernible as music at all. Then the soul,
the soul dries up like watermelon left on the vine too long.

Finally he squawked like a parrot, hissed like a rooster,
the pain had torn a hole where his heart had learned to sing.
This time the flocks did not even ask their questions,
but berated his attempts to sing of his grief. How does a bird
get over losing its voice,
how does it move past its wingless existence?

And occasionally, from the sky, a fellow flyer would hear his cry
and shout from above, “We are praying for you.”

For
ten
long
years
they
said
they would pray.

For
ten
long
years
nothing changed.

For
ten
long
years
he
longed

For visitors who would come and
take him under their wings.