The cages we inherit
The songbird sings because she must,
her voice a trembling act of trust.
Her wings press tight to iron bars,
a cage that steals her sky and stars.
She remembers how the wild winds felt —
a freedom stolen, not dispelled.
For memory’s echo, soft and slight,
can hollow even morning’s light.
The bear still paces, slow and worn,
a creature grown from grief and scorn.
Step, turn, step back — the silent plea
of something trapped that should be free.
Even asleep she feels the walls
closing like hands in quiet thralls.
Some beasts grow huge, some merely break;
both suffer for the captor’s sake.
The snake lies coiled, her spine confined,
a tightness clinging to her mind.
She sheds old skin in layered grief,
but finds in each no true relief.
What’s left behind upon the floor
still haunts the shape she takes once more.
For pain, once worn, will often stay
no matter how she fades away.
The wolf stares out through latticed wire,
a ghost of dusk, of wild desire.
Her eyes should mirror nights unbound,
but now reflect the fenced-in ground.
She growls at shadows of her past —
the forests lost, the futures cast.
The world she knew has slipped from call,
and left her here, inside a stall.
And then —
there is me, caught just the same.
I am the bird denied the sky,
the bear who walks though she would fly,
the snake who sheds but still holds pain,
the wolf who mourns what won’t return again.
My bars are memories, sharp and thin,
built from the ache beneath my skin.
I breathe, the walls breathe back at me —
a quiet kind of misery.
And so I whisper, soft and true:
I know your cage.
I wear it too.
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