Don’t look at me through eyes
like the fog that clothes the valley
on an early morning in spring
       and say that you are not free.

Willful and wild, you are the wind.
You could spring upwards as though on wings,
singing and dancing,
       entrancingly lively as you slide over the lilac.

Don’t tell me you feel trapped,
that you’ve shorn off your wings
and built a bunker, brick by brick,
       where the wind no longer touches.

“You are free” I tell you.
How can I show you what I know:
that you were meant to fly?
       Carefree and breezily as the clouds in the sky?

But when I say “go! fly away!”
You dejectedly stand,
and when I say “you are free”
       you just don’t understand.