Poetry by Silke Feltz
By Silke Feltz
Your tender wings knock at bullet-proof glass;
they refuse to understand there’s no easy way out.
No, you cannot fly into tonight’s spring air, and so you remain trapped,
on the inside, where my eyes are not the only ones finding you, seeing you.
She’s so young, she could be one of my students.
Her face lights up the second you’re in her sights, lips break into a smile.
She’s following some guard’s orders but simultaneously approaches you,
surely drawn to you and your efforts to fly free.
When she reaches the window, she inspects you closely, her index finger
slowly inching towards your tender fringes that flap, flap, flap—
causing an urgent echo inside the windowpane, inside my heart.
When her finger almost touches you, she freezes with intention,
and I hear how she stops breathing, how her whole body tries so hard
to not disrupt your efforts of finding a pathway.
She nudges the woman next to her, but
her eyes clouded and fatigued.
And you? You never stop flapping your wings,
singing your song into our souls;
a rhythmic reminder of why life simply matters—
both on the outside and on the inside.
- Silke Feltz is an Assistant Teaching Professor at the University of Oklahoma.
As a vegan rhetorician, she studies food ethics. Her poetry has been published
in Drunk Monkeys, Peeking Cat Poetry Anthology, and Writer: Craft & Context. In her spare time, Silke directs StreetKnits, a humanitarian knitting charity that provides knitwear to the homeless.