The Temptation of What’s Easy

Now I have grown into an age

In which to run a rhyme across a page

Is no more trouble than to lie awake

Scanning the night's silence for a quake

That in a distant land might kill

An infant conjured by my will.

Worst is, I fear the child is real.

It makes no difference what I feel.

Distraught, I imitate a poem by Yeats,

Hoping to pry open Morpheus' gates.

The fascination of what’s difficult,

He writes, has "dried the sap" out of his veins,

Shut in a stable by an ailing colt,

Whose sacred blood anoints its bolt.

What if—supposing all this—I read wrong?

Why, then, consult some other midnight’s psalm!