Hardy

Thrown away at birth, he was recovered,

Plucked from the swaddling-shroud, and chafed and slapped,

The crone implacable.  At last he shivered,

Drew the first breath, and howled, and lay there, trapped

In a world from which there is but one escape

And that forestalled now almost ninety years.

In such a scene as he himself might shape,

The maker of a thousand songs appears.

From this it follows, all the ironies

Life plays on one whose fate it is to follow

The way of things, the suffering one sees,

The many cups of bitterness he must swallow

Before he is permitted to be gone

Where he was headed in that early dawn.

Robert Mezey

From Collected Poems: 1952-1999, University of Arkansas
Press, © 2000.  Reprinted by permission of the author.