Simple

[GoodRedRoad]

Once there was a bird who
lived in a forest at the
bottom of a mountain.
Every day he would look up
at the top of the mountain
and wish that he could fly to its peak.
It was a dream,
though,
that most people
laughed at when he told them.
"Do you see those clouds?"
they would ask.
"Those clouds don't even reach the top of that mountain."
But the bird never listened,
and one day,
when it seemed like
no one would ever believe him,
he started to make his way up.

As he climbed higher and higher,
it got harder to breathe,
but the bird kept going.
He was three-fourths up the mountain side
when he finally perched on a lonely,
dead tree to rest.
And when he looked back down,
he saw a black dot coming closer and closer.
He didn't know what to make of it,
so he decided
he just had
to keep going.

He flew off
and after what seemed to be the longest,
hardest,
most self-destructive flight of his life,
he reached the peak of the mountain.

And as he looked out over the forest where he lived,
debating whether the green was meant to be that unbroken,
he heard someone land beside him.
"I didn't want you to be alone when you saw this.
I didn't want you to think that no one believed in you at all," she said.
And she was prettier than the sun that fell in the sky behind them.

[heinzs]

lovely parable, more prose than poem.