Epiphany

Osaze Lanre Nosaze1

nce, in a dream, I spied a ragged urchin in a valley of flowers. He was playing with the most beautiful bird I'd ever seen. Its many coloured plumes caught the rays of the sun and shattered them into flashes of blue and red and green, orange, violet, purple. Its beak was as burnished gold and its talons were silver. On its head was a crest of stars, and it had a diamond for each eye. They rolled and span, they raced and tumbled, great wings flapping, frenzied limbs flashing. As they played they laughed and screamed, and their laughter was a song. It filled the universe, rebounding from the far ends of the celestial bowl, seeping into the eager pores of everything, the earth, the trees, the wind, the stars. It was a song with two souls, two melodies, each free, each distinct. Yet, somehow, the melodies made one; they passed into each other, intertwined, fused into a single soul greater than each, greater than both. Two souls, distinct and free, yet one! What a magnificent bird, I marvelled. Why does he not put it in a cage, and hang it in his room? Or on a tree? Then the bird could not fly away, and he would have it for himself for always. What a foolish boy! I came out from behind a bush of roses. I will catch the bird, I thought, and put it in a beautiful cage for the boy, a cage made of the rarest metals and adorned with twinkling gems, a cage befitting this royal bird. How glad the urchin would be, how grateful! They stopped their play as I approached. The bird looked at me, no, raked my soul with a secret beam of light; for its fiery eyes seemed to pierce to the most hidden recesses of my heart. A great sadness stole into those beads of fire, and the bird spread its gigantic wings and flew into the sun. "Ah, you've scared off my friend," the urchin said, without a trace of loss or anger. "You're a foolish boy," I said bitterly. "You should have put it in a cage. Such a beautiful bird shouldn't be left unprotected." "But he will come back," he smiled. "He always does." "It will? Why?" I sneered. "You do not have it on a string, fool. IT IS FREE!" "Yes," the boy said, with a secret light in his eyes. "Yes; that is why he will come back..."

An earlier version of this fantasy was first published as "The Boy and the Bird" under the name of Osaze Lanre Ehonwa in Rake, No. 3, July-December, 1990, p. 13.