The Sky Keeps It's Promise Poem by Bishnupada Sethi

He returned from the war
with a heart laced in shrapnel,
each pulse a muted drum
against the iron ribs of memory.

One noon, under a banyan's vaulted shade,
a bird-seller shook his rattling cages—
parakeets, mynas, a solitary munia
flailing wings against the cage of tomorrow.
The soldier spilled his pockets;
coins rang like fallen casings.
Cage doors gaped; the sky
devoured color in a single gulp.

A boy looked on,
absorbing it from his textbook page.
His small fist gripped
a rupee and a silent oath.
Years on, the oath sprouted plumes:
every roadside cage
a battlefield he claimed.

He halted, he paid, he freed—
a sparrow, a dove, a kingfisher's blaze.
Each liberation a whispered prayer aloft,
each wingbeat a verse of liberty.

Then came the day, years deeper,
when justice's line grew faint,
villains' hands pressed like lead.
He was wronged, ensnared.

Yet the demons reeled in shock.
The law of cages inverted.
Locking hands faltered;
keys slid, bars bowed like supple reeds.

A thousand unseen wings, he sensed,
stirred the air—a tempest of grace.
He wept, not for the bars that broke,
but for the sky that held its vow.
The universe's decree, unyielding.

[a true story]