For freedoms of the birds

If you’ve come upon a stranded bird with broken wing
your sympathies ignite, the very sight entrains
a sequence of contrite compassion rising from
the awesome power of birds aloft in joyous flight,
a marvelling at freedoms they delight in.

To soar and wheel in weightless air, a sense of levity
arousing passions that despair at beauty lost, severed
in the bleak and hard impaction of a loss of flight, benign
restrictions, drear, unsympathetic anchors catching freedoms
unaware, acting in a weighted drama of benighted gravity.

And yet we see a similar plight in Nature’s use, the casualness
where it becomes a sanctioned lavatory abused and fouled,
our admiration drowned and bartered every day in senseless ways
of compromised and cluttered peaceful places we preserved
for freedoms of the birds, for curing sad depression.

Indeed, we’ve brought ourselves to breast the outer edge of an
extinction, the ledge is shattered where the mirror sits, it should excite
a future view but still obscures a clarity of vision, we try to use illusion
to improve our daily news, refuse to see the symbols of the
rot compounding in its useless, hedonistically obtuse reflection.

We delude ourselves with fantasies, reuse distinctions claiming more
is less, and less is just corrected portion of the former wonders bad
dispensed as tokens of the riches we were once the heirs to.
We know we’ve used the last of Earth’s munificent largesse and even
thought they know it too our stolid leaders still digress.
© I.D. Carswell