small black flowers that grow in the sky was Written by Richey edwards after watching a B. B. C. Q. E. D. documentary about the condition of European zoos and how animals in confinement eventually go insane. the song is about these caged animals ('You have your very own number / They dress your cage in its nature / Once you roared now you just grunt lame') with no freedom, just waiting for their death, desiring to get out and live their own life which is stolen from them ('They drag sticks along your walls / Harvest your ovaries dead mothers crawl') and die their own death ('Wanna get out won't miss you sensaround / To carry your own dead to swing your tyre tricks / Wanna get out in here you're bred dead quick'). this can be seen as a metaphor for richey's own depressed feelings about the way he felt trapped inside himself, his thoughts and his desires, guarded by others and religion and alienated from everything around him ('Here comes warden, Christ, temple, elder / Environment not yours you see through it all') with no way to get out.the lyrics of this song do remind of one of rainer maria rilke's most famous poems called 'the panther' ('der panther'), written in 1903 in the Jardin des Plantes, paris, about a panther in confinement. it was published in 1907 in 'neue gedichte'. [many thanks to sara wise for providing this information]. in english, this poem is as follows:

His vision from the passing of the bars
is grown so weary that it holds nor more.
To him it seems there are a thousand bars
and behind a thousand bars no world.

The padding gait of flexibly strong strides,
that in the very smallest circle turns,
is like a dance of strength around a center
in which stupefied a great will stands.

Only sometimes the curtain of the pupil
soundlessly parts –. Then an image enters,
goes through the tensioned stillness of the limbs
- and in the heart ceases to be.

american singer chris isaak used this phrase about black flowers in his song 'black flowers', on his 1998 album 'speak of the devil'. this song is about a mother telling her children about black flowers that grow in the sky as a metaphor for dying. the last part part of it is as follows:

[...] Tell me mother, will I die.
Yes my child and so shall I.
And never know the reason why,
little black flowers grow, in the sky.
In the sky.

And I believed you.
I believed you when you said you'd cried,
believed you when you said you'd try,
believed you when you said you loved me too.

I believed you.