The poet told us to moan, and we moaned.

*

She gave us a poem by another poet. The poem had only one word: “Bird.” The word kept repeating and it made a shape. The shape was the cage of a bird.

That’s how we learned we become our own limit. Emerson writes, “Every thought is also a prison; every heaven is also a prison.”
That’s how we ended up being this cage with no bird inside it.

All wire, no song.

*

The poet told us to moan louder.



--from A Quiet Book; Dan Beachy-Quick