We are birds that fly with battered wings.

It is painful, you know, but we want to live.

So we endure the pain. We must fly as long as we have wings.

No matter its conditions,

We must fly. We weren’t meant to have damaged wings.

But the hand of evil is everywhere.

We are the little girls and the little boys that were

Forgotten by god for a moment

In the jungle filled with beastly things, we were left unprotected.

We are damaged souls walking on broken glass that once held our beauty and innocence.

Looking for wholeness, some limp, some crawling, nevertheless we are moving.

We bear the scars of man’s weakness, the victims of those that lost their humanity,

Yet we find ways to live and, for some of us, if we can’t find a way, we create a way.

We suffer in silence among you, in the work place, the classrooms, we sit next to you in the church.

And to some we are  wives and husbands, yet you are unaware.

We are birds that fly with battered wings,

It is painful, you know, but we want to live.

So we endure the pain, no matter the conditions.

We must fly to live

©2022 Micheline Jean Louis