Methuselah

Like your predecessor you're destined to live long.
Destined to fly the canopies of Africa,
The conductor of your own orchestra.
But destiny plays no part in your life.

Passed from saint to saint,
You make a home out of your cage.
What would have been hymns
Turned to echoes of your jailers.
Their efforts to make you holy fail
As you paint portraits of their misery and pains.

This cage has crippled you.
Broken your wings.
Denied you your right to flight and truth.
You're the wreck your mother land's become.
Forced to live utopia surrounded by bars.
Looking at the horizon with a  curtain in your face.

On a fateful afternoon, your sentence is over.
Your jailer sets you free.
But what does free mean?

He throws you into the air.
What little instinct you have left
Drives you to open your wings.
With struggle you flutter like freedom itself.
But what now?

The iron roads that surrounded you
Have become your bones.
Your true home a bad nightmare.
You run back back to your prison,
Beg your jailers to take you back.
They don't want you, they say you're free.
You ask yourself what you did wrong
To be punished by freedom.

Where to go now? You linger.
Like an old man breast feeding,
You start to learn the ways of the world.

However destiny might play a part in your life.
As you struggle with your newly found life,
Your mother is fighting for her independence.
And on the day she gains it so do you.
Leaving a trail of red feathers.
You're finally free.
Flying without your wings.