Originally published on Whisper and the Roar, then Free Verse Revolution. It also appears in Between the Trees, my debut poetry collection.
In a few years time
I hope we’ll see each other again.
We’ll be in different clothes
with difference faces and partners
who aren’t you or I.
I will smile because
I’ve always been gracious
and I’ve been waiting for this.
You’ll smile too
but it will be weaker, pained,
stretched like papier-mache.
And I hope when your new wife asks
what happened between us,
you’ll say:
‘She was a bird
and I was a cage
of black bars rattling
with rage,
never unlocked
yet with the power to pluck
each feather from her wings.
She had always deserved to fly,
you could see it in her eyes;
small, beady and watchful
but if she ever stepped too close
to the edge
I would give her a mouthful,
of steel, rust and dust.
I wasn’t good enough
so I forced her to believe
it was her;
her fire, her salt,
her brimstone, her faults
and her wings.
Those wings which refused to cease
and continued to beat
against the bars of my chest,
the crook of my arm
the back of my head.
She left me,
not because she outgrew me
but because she never belonged
in a cage in the first place.’
You won’t say anything more
because on cue
my shoulder blades will part
for my wings to unfurl.
They are fuller, they glimmer
more than when you saw them last.
They are iridescent;
bewitching in moonlight,
spellbinding in sunshine
and they are mine, all mine;
the bird who was finally freed
to fly.
Photograph & poem: © Kristiana Reed 2019
Available internationally
