Love Your Freedom Poem by Mohabeer Beeharry

I am bird.
Like all creatures
I value my freedom.

Having been imprisoned for so long
I have forgotten what freedom tastes like.

My wings have hardened
And my sight shortened.

There is no outside.
The inside is limited,
An eye sore.

Gone the blue sky
And the warm sunshine.

Gone the chirps
And the cool taste of the woodland brook.

Once freedom was my birthright
Now a shrivelled dream,
Turned into a recurrent nightmare.

Who my mother and father were?
Through vague screens of folding mist
Glimpses of their faces
Fan pass.

I hardly remember the village
I came from
For I was plucked from my father's home,
Except for a great river
And a sprawling field of wild flowers.

Freedom was my twin brother.
We were born together
Raised together.

For the loss of it
I have died many a time behind these bars.