Worms were never appealing to you -
seeds, berries, echos, and ghosts you preferred.
And kindred spirits and misty mornings.

I remember I found you alone -
your brothers and sisters strewn around you,
like dead leaves in the fall -
a whisper of their bird-song
still sighing on the wind.

So I held you in my shirt's breast pocket,
and whistled while I knitted a nest.
Just a little bundle of grass and string
but you settled in.

I thought you would sing sad songs in the evenings,
like the wise women that sat on porch swings.
But you just mourned with soulful eyes,
haunted by the shadows of your past.

You waited for something,
a memory, a word, a release.
I saw the knowing in you then -
the knowing of much more than life and death,
than seeds and windows and metal bars.

And I sighed.
How much I long for my own release,
not from life, no:
from my own expectations,
from single-stories and stereotypes.

Let me fly free, you cry.
You're too much like me, I sigh.