Bread in Captivity

the pigeon has the entire sky

to soar, explore, to glide and fly

and yet he circles a small box

where most of the day he is locked,

prisoner to the hand that feeds,

prisoner to his basic needs

if only he could learn to choose

to trust beyond man’s evil ruse ,

to feel and know the god within

beyond his captors evil sin

to trust in his own knowing heart

to fly far away, to depart,

recreating his life as art

✨✨✨✨✨✨✨✨✨✨✨✨✨✨✨✨✨✨✨✨✨✨✨✨✨✨✨✨

Sadly inspired by the wooden boxes of pigeons I have seen everywhere in Sri Lanka. In my Colombo house there was a park next door where locals kept around 12 pigeons.

The box must have been sweltering and stinking under the beating sun and air temperature of 30-35°. The captors would come and let them out to fly for around an hour a day at sunset. They would tire quickly because their wings were weak, so they would land on my balcony.

I cried a lot of tears over those pigeons. I cried a lot of tears over how cruel and ignorant people are. I also cried a lot for myself. I realised they were a mirror for me. How my own wings were so weakened by my lifetime of prisons.

How I had spent a lifetime trading my birthright of freedom for food and shelter security. Born into captivity and programmed to believe I had no choice but to exist this way. Reliant upon my captor to tell me when I could eat, when I could fly, when I should return.

And when you are born into such a life, even though you know deep in your heart it is all wrong - you have been made so weak and have so much fear that you don’t break free. You perceive that you can’t. You don’t trust in the goodness of the world, or god, when this is your normal. How can you?

And yet the whole world is right there. All it takes is for them to not return to the cage. To do the scary thing. To be completely exposed. To courageously declare that one day in freedom is worth more than a 1000 years in captivity. And never return.