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!