Fever Birds

Oh Lord I am sick and I will not be well.
I’m spitting up blood and coughing up bread.
My father’s men wait at the gates of my cell.
There’s black water seeping through the sheets of my bed
and the fever birds are coming to swarm round my head.

Oh Lord I was born in the mouth of a mountain.
I lived with my mother in a house made of tin.
But my father came in the cover of moonlight.
He took me to his mansion and locked me in.
And the fever birds are coming to scratch at my skin.

Oh Lord how I wept to be kept from my mother!
My body grew wasted, my lungs filled with tears.
But I learned how to fly on the wings of my sickness,
back to my mother and back through the years
with the fever birds coming to shriek in my ears.

One morning I woke and looked up above me.
I saw a girl with the brightness of a hundred Julys.
She wiped off my head and she said she would love me.
And I felt a white light come creeping up through my thighs
and the fever birds coming to claw out my eyes.

I lay there beside her in the blindness of passion.
But in the morning I turned and saw what she’d done.
There were sores on my body where her lips had kissed me.
And I started to scream but no scream would come
for the fever birds had torn out my tongue.

Oh Lord I am sick and I will not get better.
So listen you lovers who seek solace from pain.
Watch how you fly on the wings of your sickness.
Your dreams of beauty will just drive you insane
and the fever birds are coming to roost in your brain.

Tam Lin