A Poem: Warning to the Reader

Thank you to Doug for sharing this with me...

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Warning to the Reader

Robert Bly
　
Sometimes farm granaries become especially beautiful
when all the oats or wheat are gone, and wind has swept the rough floor clean.
Standing inside, we see around us, coming in through the cracks
between shrunken wall boards, bands or strips of sunlight.
So in a poem about imprisonment, one sees a little light.
But how many birds have died trapped in these granaries?
The bird, seeing freedom in the light, flutters up the walls
and falls back again and again.
The way out is where the rats enter and leave;
but the rat's hole is low to the floor.
Writers, be careful then by showing the sunlight on the walls
not to promise the anxious and panicky blackbirds a way out!
I say to the reader, beware.
Readers who love poems of light may sit hunched in the corner
with nothing in their gizzards for four days, light failing, the eyes glazed . . .
They may end as a mound of feathers and a skull on the open boardwood floor .

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Your pain is the breaking of the shell that encloses your understanding.

~ Kahlil Gibran