The Bird Painful Experiences: Living Crutches

By: Yousef Zreagat

To my life friend Ali, “The Crutches Poet”

Tow trees in two distant forests in Gilead Mountains giving shade for people and safe haven for birds. A man slashes the first branch from an oak tree and the second from an olive tree. They were abandoned for months, dyeing out before a carpenter took them and turned them into crutches for a young boy.

“Try them and be careful my sweet heart, they will help you going to school instead of the wheelchair” said his mother. He was a young poet who writes love poems for all people in this world, a world he dreams to explore and establish friendship and love with. He didn’t have a bed to sleep on, so the first night he laid them on the floor next to his mattress saying: “promise not to let me down and I will make you my friends”. A week later he painted them greenish just like their living color and wrote on them “Let us share love and we will make a change in this world “.

They carried him ups and downs for years, they accompanied him to poetry evenings, listening to his romantic poetry and his sad story since he became crippled at the age of five. He kept talking to them and in one evening in his room, he gladly read a poem for them naming it “My Friends Forever”. The crutches felt his happiness when they carried his strong slim body during his first visit to Liverpool, where he met his one day friend Mark. They felt his worm tears dropping on them when his mother passed away. They also felt injured when he bought a car and put them in the back seat.

The dreamer poet still watches his crutches every morning believes to see them giving oak and olive buds that will become branches one day.