For Freedoms Of The Birds (rev)

If you have 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, of marvelling
at freedoms they delight in.

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

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

We've brought ourselves to breast extinction’s
outer edge, the ledge is shattered where a mirror
sits, it should excite a future view but still abjures
illusion used in daily news, we refuse to see the
symbols of a rot compounding in its uselessness,
of hedonistically confused expressionists.

We delude ourselves, reuse distinctions claiming
more is less – and less a fantasy of wonders
dressed as token riches we once were the heirs to.
We know we’ve used the last of Earth’s munificent
largesse and though they know it too our merchant
managed leadership will endlessly digress.
© 2006, I.D. Carswell