This Is What Freedom Means After You Have Been Broken

Once
you were made of the sky
do you remember that?

Before they told you
what you were supposed to be
Before they destroyed your elegant wings.

Before they tricked you and chained you
to an idea, to a prison they made for you
branded you with a painful label

Tried to remold you
into something easier
for them to understand.

But your blood
didn’t let you forget,
did it?

The taste of the sky,
The memories of flying to the horizon
just to kiss the sun before he fell asleep.

Once Apollo himself loved you so much,
that he softened the sun’s heat
so it could not melt your wings.

He is still waiting
for you to remember
who you were.

Come, you have always known
what it would take to eat those chains,
to fly free again.

Nothing about this was ever going
to be easy, freedom was built
on backs and bones and blood.

Take the thing that is owed to you.
Forge new wings
in the belly of betrayal.

Watch them quiver as you rise again,
this time breathing fire
your spine made of fury.

Show them what happens when they try
to steal the voices born of the sky,
become your own battlecry.