Her keepers are thoughtful: nutritious food, medicine, shelter, instructional arena flights.
She is safe from poachers, electric wires, hunger, territorial squabbles.
Her life should be long and comfortable.
But sometimes in her dreams
she tastes clouds on her wingtips,
fishes from a tree beside a wild river.
In the hollow shafts of her feathers,
ancient memories and instincts slumber.
Her cells remember carving a path against wild currents of wind
with strength of muscle, finesse of feathers,
the sensing and yielding to sensuous currents, like a lover carried into new delights.
Surrender and control, control and surrender: the great dance smolders in her cells,
felt only as a restlessness in the charged air before a storm,
a vague longing in the magic halflight of dusk,
or in the first beckoning blush of a clear dawn.
Once a keeper, awed by her wild beauty,
Smuggled her out to the high desert country and let her fly, free.
Ah! intoxicating discovery of power and grace in her body, in her blood!
Fierce joy of wind under her great wings,
The taste of choice and will,
the rapture and terror of freedom.
But there were still stripes across her sky.
And when her would-be liberator turned to leave, she followed him,
stooping to his reluctant glove.
Thoughts and imagination clipped, conformed,
muscles bound by fear, remembered pain, imagined pain...
She has become her own jailer.
How could it be otherwise? It's what she sees around her; it's all she knows.
Almost.
Except on clear nights with a silver moon.
Except when lightning flashes and wind calls the trees to frenzied dancing.
This will save her.
She cannot entirely forget the rich, astonishing possibilities she glimpsed in the world, in herself.
She will cherish the small flame of her longing for the "impossible"
until an inferno bursts her most ungently
into dangerous uncertainties and occasional ecstasy,
the wandering spiral flight to freedom.
Adelia (Dee) Kehoe is currently coauthoring a book with Ann Marie Holmes on how to hear/cooperate with the living energies of earth in daily life.
(c)2005 Talking Leaves
Summer/Fall 2005
Volume 15, Numbers 2 & 3
Deep Ecology, Permaculture, & Peace