Pick up the bird with a broken wing.
Human hands kill wounded
more often than they heal,
but I don't think yours
could kill.
Other hands have touched you
not so gently. Father and Fatherland
both cast you out. Not one thing
nor the other, you fled
the closing gates
in which so many, trapped,
found hell in Hitler's dream of
a cleansed, perfected
race.
Perhaps that hell itself
would have been preferable.
Whether because
you hate yourself for living
when so many died,
know only silence in the sounds
that tell most men they
and their world are alive,
or still bear a sentence of death
from a father who
didn’t accept an imperfect
child,
after so many years you still flee
the knock in the night.
But, even fleeing,
pause to reach out,
play for me
songs
you haven't heard
since long before those
terrible gates
beckoned.
Oh, yes, I would trust you with
an injured bird.
Poem ©1991 by Catherine A. Hampton. All rights reserved. Do not republish or distribute in any form, electronic or hard copy, without the author's permission.
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