Holy Innocents

Holy Innocents

There were several of us in the airy house,

one or two to a cage and tended well

by the withered man and his quiet

wife. We thrilled to the gentle care they gave us,

and we had forgotten that we had

ever flown free in the open sky

with its wonders and its hazards. We sang

out our gratitude, and we loved to

speak to the lined faces that peered up

 

at us when they spilled food and

sweet water into our cups or changed the paper

on our floors. We hung in our small

homes in the ivory-colored light

that sifted in through the paper panes

and we hopped and flitted past the hours

in a peace that we assumed all people

provided to their friends. But the day

of wrath came to us, and the sirens

 

began singing a song unlike ours,

and the large house shook from the death

dropping from the skies, and our little

houses trembled under the polished beams,

and the wails of war blended with the

moans from our keepers, our keepers who dashed

from room to room, releasing us so that

we might not be burned to death in the

loving captivity of our small houses.

 

Some of my kin flew from the cages

when the man and his wife opened

the tiny doors and shook the bamboo boxes,

but in their panic and the foreign feel of

freedom, they soared through the black night

air to doom’s light, straight to the towers of flames

that were rising all around the house,

and they died in a fast flash, too quickly

to even fear the terrible roaring heat

 

into which they fled. The old man helped

his wife down into the garden, and then he returned

to our cage and took us down and held us

next to his lean old chest and whispered that if

we were going to die, we should do so

in familiar surroundings, in our cage

where we had known our lives and hours and slumbers.

My cage-kin stopped singing and breathing forever

on the next day, probably of shock,

 

but I lived on and swing here now on my

perch in this gloomy room where my

man and his mate were forced to shelter after

the bombs had stolen all that any of us

ever knew of the budding world and its

softness. My songs are thinner now, as are

the aging warbles of the wizened couple,

and we three, huddled and flightless, await

the next thunders to fall from heaven.

 

~ by S.K. Orr

Inspired by Akira Kurosawa’s Madadayo