Alexander's Poem (from Book 5-A WIP)

It’s not that life’s not pure and sweet. 

No, that has never been my ‘plaint,

So it is, I suppose, 

But most of all … it ain’t.

 

And when the wind is in the east, and all the world is fire,

I grant my stars have led me wrong to spend my life in ire.

Long striven I to fight and mend against the forces stark,

And all is waste, the scars proclaim, nigh the coming dark.

 

The daily task of cant and can, does wear a body down,

Opening the pores of human souls to let the p’ison run.

 

When you feed, it is someone’s sweat that salts what e’re you eat.

Be it chicken, beef or swine it marks another man's defeat,

Starvation looms without the door, unless each day they tread,

To barn, or plow, or wretched desk,

To labor there with brow or hand,

From morning crow to morning’s crow.

By cleverness or stroke or blow.

 

Yet there’s always one to try to take for his whatever you have wrought,

By guile, by law, by writ, or sword, usurps what he had naught.

 

What man or beast is owed a gift unless it’s won by toils,

So too the mother’s travail rends the self in pains and groan;

 Yet in that gilded chamber’s gasp a fragile heartbeat coils—

A helpless babe clenches hard for hope and claims it as his own.