Wings Bound
Sunlight seared gold across cold tiles,
her mother’s hands moulding tender skin.
Cheeks pressed to air, she ruled with wiles,
blind to the tide that pulled her within.
Her father’s pride beneath the boards lay deep,
a silent swell, austere, deliberate.
I see her still, the child who could not keep
her innocence from the world’s weighty state.
She ran with him—a coin, a whispered trade,
sunlight congealed in a shadowed veil.
Her pulse became a ledger, each hope weighed,
each warmth exacted, each fragile detail.
Iron hummed beneath her feathered wings,
like merciless strings, the bars pressed down.
Hands—greedy, precise, exact—claimed all things,
erasing her ledger, her delicate renown.
The rope coiled soft, intimate, oppressive near,
pressing secrets into skin she could barely hear.
Her palm touched the bars, half trembling, half brave,
half in fragile hope, half sensing the grave.
A hollow bell clicked, echoing slow,
matching the pulse she could not let go.
A laugh drifted—tiny, absurd, slight—
crumbs of joy in a caged bird’s faint light.
She fluttered, recalling mornings unconfined,
bread and honey, innocence revered.
Ink smudged across her trembling mind,
thoughts folded quietly, silently steered.
Repentance coiled tight, sheets worn by nights,
Sometimes she wished to unmake herself.
Yet some pulse endured, a whisper of lights,
existence persisted, quietly itself.
A breath, a glance, a pulse enumerated twice,
moments of being cruel yet precise.
She smiled faintly, defiant, exiled,
gesture small, impossibly concise.
Wings bound, body claimed, heart betrayed,
yet she moved, unbroken, unafraid.
Even here, carved in air, her truth persists,
precise, unclaimed, in shadowed twists.
Life insists in tiny, unclaimed motions,
in fluttering wings, in whispered devotions.
And I—entangled, witness to her vertiginous plight—
behold the child, the ledger, the caged bird’s quiet blight.
Not emancipated, nor entire, yet awake,
and in that delicate exigence,
all phenomena suspend
in hushed, unpossessed potentiality,
suspended,
perhaps,
to be fathomed—
and should we linger in this scrutiny,
we cannot avert our gaze.
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