The Enclosure
The Wings of Words
Listen Here- Podcast Style
Caged birds sing of freedom.
Free birds fly.Thorolf Rafto
The Enclosure
I can’t see the wind
I watch the leaves twirl
The birds twist and turn
spreading their wings
to land freely in a tree
Just outside my window
Not everyone sings
Pity looks up from the paper
I used to write on
More real than this screen
I miss the feel of its edges
Sometimes they cut me
To show me I was alive
The glass numbs
The keyboard murmurs
The birds sing
They watch me through this window
Behind this glass there is no world
I wait for it to come to me
The birds will be back again tomorrow
Lined up to watch me
To show me to their young
© Jamie Millard
At times I feel captive and appear to be living in an enclosure. Behind a screen and behind a window. Separate from nature and the world. Do I witness anything myself anymore?
Do we watch what we know or do we watch to know?
Muriel M here on Substack wrote beautifully in her article Reading and Writing, “I do not write what I know, I write to know.”
I write to know!
The late Canadian poet and language professor Carl Leggo wrote “I live in language and language lives in me”. The late Nobel Prize recipient Irish poet Seamus Heaney sharing, “I had already begun a journey into the wideness of the world. This in turn became a journey into the wideness of language, a journey where each point of arrival— whether in one’s poetry or one’s life—turned out to be a stepping stone rather than a destination.”
What is on the other side of these glass screens? What lives outside of our glass windows? What is inside of me? What am I inside of? We live into those questions. In living in the wideness of this world I invite in the wideness of language to live inside of me. To create through me. Through the poetry of language I can inquire, I can be present, I can learn, I can heal, I can let go, and I can transform. Words find me and in setting those words free, I am free. I write to be free. I can step along these words to new points of arrival. I am wrapped in the world, and the the world is born again inside of me. I become one with the wind, slowly spreading these wings to fly.
The full audio version can be found under the main title headings above.
Thank you for being here as a witness.
Lots of love,
Jamie
Thank you for this poetry you just wrote! What is the meaning behind the meaning of meaning? Feelings ineffable. The spoken word a door. A space that opens up into silence. An invitation to reveal a knowing that already exists beyond a spelling. A spell that casts us into the bones. Of home. Thanks for seeing beyond, between, and below the words. 🙏❤️
This poem reaches deep into inner experience - and articulates the 'result' in such a flowing way to the openness of life. Birds always make my heart sing and I sometimes get that sense they are the ones who are free, and I'm the one in a cage - or at least I'm the one who has become a 'domesticated animal' and have lost the wildness of my deeper nature. Ah well, poetry to the rescue again. 😊