The Book of Sorren

The Sparrow in the Keep

What a delicate garden you tend

When you prune and you shear and you bend

You watched from afar, and you waited

and you wondered, how it was going to end

A fragile fruit is easily bruised

when it falls to the ground in the storm

but a delicate fruit falls far from the tree

and from whence it may go to be born

The beautiful fruit will wither and die

or be eaten with wondrous love

And the day will come again

that the mystery has revealed

The wisdom in the eye of the dove

I thought about this fragment for a long time trying to figure out what Sorren was trying to say.  Was he equating himself with the fruit I wondered?  Further, I wondered, could a lonely servant, a man confined to the bitter lamentations of a lonely King, have the time or the ability to develop such metaphorical associations?  I thought not, but when I contemplated the beauty of the verse I could not deny that even a man of such limitations as Sorren was capable of insights . . . or perhaps was it inspiration?  And the gardener?  Sorren was not the gardner in this context, and that was his great insight.  Loneliness is a great teacher.