Musee des Beaux Arts

About suffering they were never wrong,

The Old Masters: how well they

Its human position; how it takes

While someone else is eating or opening a window or just walking dully along;

How, when the aged are reverently, passionately

For the miraculous birth, there always must

Children who did not specially want it to happen,

On a pond at the edge of the wood:

They never

That even the dreadful martyrdom must run its

Anyhow in a corner, some untidy

Where the dogs go on with their doggy life and the torturer's

Scratches its innocent behind on a tree.

In Brueghel's Icarus for instance: how everything turns

Quite leisurely from the disaster; the ploughman

Have heard the splash, the forsaken cry,

But for him it was not an important failure; the sun

As it had to on the white legs disappearing into the

Water; and the expensive delicate ship that must have

Something amazing, a boy falling out of the sky,

Had somewhere to get to and sailed calmly on.