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Georgia Douglas Johnson
The heart of a woman goes forth with the dawn,
As a lone bird, soft winging, so restlessly on,
Afar o'er life's turrets and vales does it roam
In the wake of those echoes the heart calls home.
The heart of a woman falls back with the night,
And enters some alien cage in its plight,
And tries to forget it has dreamed of the stars
While it breaks, breaks, breaks on the sheltering bars.
A prison is a cage
Where untamable beasts
Lie in disquiet, quietly raging
As the iron bars melt in the heat
Of their volcanic minds –
Or like me, frozen beneath
An inundation of emotions.
There is no escape
From this place I named The Cage
But there’s help for once.
Uncomfortable
In my own home
Crawling
Under my own skin
Itching
At my own mask
Fighing
From my own cage
Comlacent
In my own life
Hurting
To my own self
Waiting
On my own future
There are so many things I have to say
But my body is a cage
I dropped them off along the way
And called myself a sage
I really wish I could have stayed
Or waited just a little while
But I'm frivolous
Ostentatious
Presumptuous
Sick
I'm going to be sick
I'm smiling during the day but during certain periods it all just consumes me.
It's like i'm floating in space
raging and trapped in a cage
That's only big enough for me to stand.
The bear puts both arms around the tree above her
And draws it down as if it were a lover
And its choke cherries lips to kiss good-bye,
Then lets it snap back upright in the sky.
Her next step rocks a boulder on the wall
(She’s making her cross-country in the fall).
Her great weight creaks the barbed-wire in its staples
As she flings over and off down through the maples,
Leaving on one wire tooth a lock of hair.
Such is the uncaged progress of the bear.
The world has room to make a bear feel free;
The universe seems cramped to you and me.
Man acts more like the poor bear in a cage
That all day fights a nervous inward rage,
His mood rejecting all his mind suggests.
He paces back and forth and never rests
I was a small child
when a bird flew into our house —
I caught it.
It was tweeting and tweeting
trying to flee.
‘Free it’, my grandfather said.
‘No’, I replied, ‘it is singing.
Let’s keep it in a cage’.
‘It is crying’, he said.
‘Birds sing only in the forest;
in the cage, they just cry.’
He opened the window.
I let the bird go.
Little Robin red breast,
I hear you sing your song.
I would love to have you put it into my little cage,
Into my little mouth.
My spirit is a captive bird
That beats against its cage all day,
Until its winging strength is whirred
Vainly away.
My spirit learns its impotence
Only when night has blurred its bars.
Wings seem a strange impertinence
Before the stars.
Many cages round me,
Bar on bar
Stand grim, forbidding!
Ghostly pressures
Clutch my heart.
I gaze with eyes unseeing —
Whereunto may I wander free?
Alas, alas!
My garden walks lie inwardly!
There are yellow birds within the cage;
Beside its gilded bars there stand the women
Whom the Great Prince loves to honour.
They wear silken robes and jewels in their hair,
And live in a pretty pink and yellow house.
But the women look not at the captive singing-birds,
Nor listen to their song,
Their eyes follow the flight of two white-breasted doves,
Winging their way towards the wind-torn clouds.