Promise

I found this poem while I was cleaning up my dorm room. I have a big stack poems and rap verses that I'll probably never show anyone, but here's one that seems worth reproducing.

Promise
I have known the futility of flight,
infant wings intimidated by the overwhelming gray pinions
of assured eagles, nests that smother speckled eggs,
pellets that whistle through the most stirring mating call,
crying children who cradle cadavers that their cats left,
hallways—whitewashed and sanded—that forget holes from the talons
of the most territorial fowl who dwelled there,
the ringing squawks that each one produced.
And I have seen, too how the penguin walks,
waddles, waits, and worries, wistful atop his mound,
clumsy but dignified, unrefined, distilled,
made divine by his own plague, proper, exact,
unconfined, for he dreams not of piercing the skies.