Bird Cage

The sky is a glittering sapphire. Impossibly hard and unrelenting. He cannot bear to look upon it and yet he sees it all the same. The day is an enigma. It’s siblings have contained a grey that matched his mood. Now, as he dares to consider his unwitting sacrifice there is crisp clarity all about him.

He walks. Aware that this is the closest he will ever come to illusory escape, for he brings his prison along with him, in the confines of which is the eternal punishment he must endure. Leaving the path, he notes that the meadow has been mown down. A place that spoke to him of unobtainable joy, robbed of its strength. The resonance he experiences is almost debilitating. He hardly notices the slowing of his pace.

In the midst of the field he peters out. Imagining the taste of the grass’s blood during the battlefield massacre. The pleasingly sweet stench of death drenching the horror of the inhabitants of a world that is put to the sword. Order is a mayfly. It clings onto a precarious state of affairs with a misplaced tenacity. All is transition. There is no choice in this. Only the experience of magic. Mostly dark.

The sun slaps down relentlessly upon his bent back. He smiles at the disrespect he affords it. Telling himself that the fires of life hide from him. Ashamed of what they witnessed and did nothing to prevent. Those fires will one day consume everything around him and more. He will be long gone by then. Already is.

Only now does he hear them. The incessant hum of nature’s fridge. He learned to acclimatise himself to the sounds around him. Drowning them out in loud indifference and a cloying wax of ignorance. The birds scream and wail around him. Frantic laments. Dire warnings. His stomach turns. Telling him he should not be here. He trespasses. Always trespassing. An unwanted presence in a moment of grief. Grief to mirror his own. He is a cloud stealing the brightness of every day.

He looks about him as though seeing this place for the very first time. Trees poking out from the hedge row to his right. Cruel fingers rising out of the dirt. He feels the presence of the thumb to his left as he stands on a palm that will close in on him and would crush him were he to contain any substance.

Then he sees it. The reason he has been brought to this open temple of sacrifices. The delicate form misplaced upon the receding grasses before him. He stands. Head bowed. His prayer is an impossible wish. A want that has grown into a need for things to be different. Better in the childish way he has always wanted them to be.

It does not need to be like this.

His unheard chant to a world too busy with the construction of its own finality.

The world he created for her was not perfect, but it would do. On the first day he said “let there be love” and there was. There was always love. There still is. He feels its ragged edges around the sacrifice he was compelled to make. A sacrifice that he never thought would come to fruition. For when a lover gives their heart freely, they do so safe in the knowledge of the reciprocity of all things. That they are rewarded with the heart of the object of their desire. The roots of life entwined in eternity. This a trade of treasure between pirates embarking upon the adventure of a lifetime.

His next breath comes through in a laboured and painful sob. Catching on the broken and sharp edges of his sorrow. The screams of the tiny mourners pierce him a thousand times. The reflection of the fires behind him dance in the sapphire gem above him and all he can do is kneel before the fallen. Worship at the altar of nothing. Making himself smaller but failing to be adequately diminished. Always falling short of what is required.

Now he understands perfection. Opens up to the patterns of the universe. The tiny figure has been cast out from the sky. The fallen at rest in a foreign field. And the war rages on. A conflict without end.

Gingerly and with fear of his own potential for wrongdoing, he gathers up the dream and holds it in his hands. The warmth is not its own. It is the desperate heat of his hope. Tears erupt from him and rain gently upon an end. An end that was there from the very start.

Elevating the tiny warrior in his left hand so all can see. He pulls at his shirt with his free hand. The gesture is at first ineffective. Shaming him. He pulls again. For the fallen. Not for him. Never for him. This time the buttons are launched forth and land in the carcass of the meadow to be swallowed up and lost.

Flailing hand now on the bared and empty cage that has lost all promise, he pulls at the bars. Certain that they will not budge. She took the key once she knew the sacrifice had been made. Defiled the sacred within him and threw away any way forward for him. There is no redemption now. Only blind acts that mark the remaining expanse of time.

Miraculously, the cage creaks open. First one door and then its sister. He pulls and claws at his chest until he is wide open, raw and vulnerable. Following an instinct as old as the sapphire sky and the ruby fires that singe his back.

Further sacrifice is required. Only the loss of everything will suffice. Rocking back and forth on his haunches he feels the pain at last. Feels it all. A coward no longer, he gives forth of a breathless and silent scream and for one terrifying moment the world falls silent and bears witness to the broken tragedy of him.

With a sudden and decisive movement. Acting before he can undo himself in thought, he thrusts his left hand into his chest. Lets go of the precious cargo he reverentially held aloft. Leaving it at rest in the mausoleum he has become. Slamming the doors shut on infinite grief. Barring the cage with a vengeful force of will that rises up within him from unknowable depths.

He is not yet done.

There is a sense of falling. He takes the place of the stricken bird and experiences the death of its innocence. The pain of it burns away the numbness he wrongly thought had rendered him to nought.

The sapphire eye gazes down upon the reborn man and renews him with purifying tears. As he awakens he is cocooned in songs of hope and joy. There is a gentle fluttering within and an impossible lightness as the music of the world sweeps him away from the darkness he has dwelt in for far too long. This a celebration of what is given. For to give love freely is the highest of endeavours and will always reap its reward.