A Broken-Winged Canary

Broken-winged one — come, raise that wing!
It is hard for your eyelid to close.
I see you gone slack, sick at heart,
your very throat refusing to swallow.

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Broken-winged one, why should we fly?
Come, let us hop about on the mat.
You would mount the back of the open air,
and that has now become hard for you.

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Shall one fly who flies without a wing!! —
a weakling battling the wild gusts?
Hopes, upon my life, that passion has wept,
and a covenant spent, and vanished, and gone.

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My faithful friend... in the garden of delight,
my chosen companion... in my old life —
my comrade has forgotten the road of the sky;
he takes his pattern from my wounded, choked heart.

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I offer a house of delicate walls
where you will find grain and water and home.
You are no prisoner, beloved of heaven,
but a guest in generous quarters.

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And this garden is the best of summer resorts,
a meadow of delicious, delightful living:
you commune with companions in the sweetest of tongues,
and the autumn morning is lovely there.

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Sing your sorrow to the daisies,
and tell them the tale of time;
for here is a captive pressed fast to the soil
who seems, all his days, free — laughing in his very being.

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Think of the garden's thorn-set roses:
they live upon thorns the life of kings —
a fresh young bloom, quick to perish,
dying and living with a laughing face.

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I shall hang your house in the grape-arbor,
to be carried along the gleaming posts;
and before you enter the house of winter
you will bid farewell to your departing company.

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And you will pass the dreary, hateful winter —
a grieving heart and a broken wing;
hearts take comfort in their own kind,
and the aching one shelters at the sick one's breast.

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Ours it is to accept the decree of heaven:
O my nightingale, be content, and fate will be content.
Your two wings are contentment — so let your eyes
go roaming, and sing out in sweet song.

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Canary, we are both restive captives:
your fetter is weakness, and mine is madness.
You were created free, so you keen with grief,
and you have sung to the fetter till it grows light.