Yes, let’s lament.  Do you know how haltingly,

how begrudgingly, your blood turned back,

when you summoned it from its incomparable circling?

And how bewildered it was to take up again

the body’s trivial circulations; and with what mistrust

and stonishment it entered the placenta,

and then suddenly it was itred from the long journey back.

And you drove it, you shoved it forward,

you dragged it to the site of fire, as

one flails a group of animals to the sacrifice;

and you even wanted it to be happy there.

And at last you compelled it:  and it was happy,

and it ran to you and surrendered itself up.  You thought,

because you were used to another scale,

that it would take but a little while, but

now you were in time, and time is long.

And time passes, and time increases, and time

is like a relapse into an endless illness.

How short your life turned out to be, measured

against those hours when you sat silently

bending the many energies of your multifarious

future back down into this new child-sprout,

which once again was fate.  O painful labor.

O labor beyond all strength.  Day after day

you did it, dragged yourself to it,

extracted the lovely weft from the loom

and used all your threads in another way.

And in the end you even had the spirit to celebrate.