Paper Crane | Teen Ink

Paper Crane

January 2, 2011
By unprocessed BRONZE, Oakland, California
unprocessed BRONZE, Oakland, California
2 articles 0 photos 2 comments

She is bound within a rhyme pattern
Trying to flee but flying back off the long wrong song
Successive final words

Bars in her cage.
Perhaps she realizes that past this constraint is another, insurmountable:
The edge of the page
And there is nothing beyond that edge which this ink-child could thrive on.
Perhaps she realizes.
Perhaps she doesn’t care.

Maybe once (if) she breaks through the scheme she will decorate the page with paints instead of words
Because maybe she does not care for words at all.
Maybe she wants to write music or solve equations
To fashion her world into little paper origami cranes
Or maybe she wants to do nothing at all.
But she is required to keep writing the poem of her life
And though she could construct an epic
Though she could craft her words into such a frenzy of love and laughter and life that even the illiterate would be swept away
She is so consumed by her desire to break free that her poetry stumbles.
She too stumbles, trying to run away but only running out of time
She just barely finishes her lines with the requisite rhyme.


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