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Milky eyes look deep

Broken wings teach souls to fly

Earthly deception

Beauty transcends its chalice

Wisdom sees beyond its form

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The photo for this week’s prompt was taken in a London park a few years ago. I was wandering, watching the birds and flowers, while I waited for my son and spotted this magpie in the shadows.

I thought he was injured at first, especially when he calmly let me approach, but after watching him for a while it became evident that if the old bird had suffered an injury, it was so long ago that he had adapted to living with its scars.

Perhaps the wise old magpie realised that an urban park provided a safer haven and a source of food for one who could not forage as Nature had intended. There are many who feed the birds and many more who discard leftover food. He certainly managed to get around easily enough. He was in no obvious discomfort and his plumage was glossy and looked healthy. A devastating injury had changed his life, but not ended his capacity for living.

As I watched, I had the odd impression that he was a teacher, and took his obvious ease as a good omen… I was waiting for my son to have the trike he was just buying back then adapted to his needs. And a good omen he turned out to be, as just weeks later, Nick competed in the first Para-triathlon, raising, with the help of the blogging community, thousands of pounds for charity.

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Thank you so much to everyone who took part this week and to everyone who reblogged the prompt, round up and the individual responses! A new prompt will be published later today. As always, I will reblog as many contributions as space and time allows as they come in… and all of them will be featured in the round-up next Thursday.

All the posts are listed below, so please click on the links below to read them and leave a comment for the author!

Pingbacks do not always come through… if you have written a post for this challenge and it does not appear in the round-up, please leave a link to your post in the comments and I will add it to the list.

An invitation to writephoto writers…

As there are usually too many contributions to reblog all of them every week, and so that we can get to know their writers, I would like to invite all writephoto writers to come and introduce themselves on the blog as my guest! Click here for details.

Come and join in!

Many thanks to this week’s contributors:

Leena at Soul Connection

Christine Bolton at Poetry for Healing

Hayley R. Hardman at The Story Files

Kerfe Roig at K- Lines that Aim to Be

Jen Goldie at Starlight and Moonbeams

Jane Dougherty Writes

Roberta Eaton at Roberta Writes

Rosemary Carlson, Writer

Padre’s Ramblings

Rebecca Cutler at Beckie’s Mental Mess

Kathy Lauren Miller at A View to a Book

Chris Hewitt at I.Mused

Cheryl at The Bag Lady

Tina Stewart Brakebill

Di at pensitivity101

Teresa Smeigh at Tessa can do it

Sadje at Keep it Alive

Bobby Fairfield at When the pen takes control

Anita from Anita Dawes and Jaye Marie

M. Brazfield at Words Less Spoken

Neel Anil Panicker

Alethea Kehas at The Light Behind the Story

Joe M at Does Writing Excuse Watching?

Phillip Knight Scott at Reverie in Reverse

Na’ama Yehuda

Sisyphus at Of Glass and Paper

Trent P. McDonald at Trent’s World

Jim Adams at A Unique Title for Me

Reena Saxena

Iain Kelly