No One Believed Me

I brought with me, when I was born, a mind that had just been invented,
A view of a world filled with miraculous things,
Where the shrubs were not cut to appear to be poodles
And children did not go hungry in the night.

And my neighbor rejected me,
My most necessary servicers did me harm,
My friend denied that I was me.

Suddenly the preacher could not sing any more,
On account of his sudden nearness to a truth.

Young birds fell from the sky in droves,
To lie in chairs on decks, sunning themselves.

Three thousand elderly men dove naked into a thing called life
And came up grinning, with feathers in their teeth

Holes in mountains of unfathomable science,
Hollowed out from the inside by time alone,
Restrain the echoes of centuries of nothingness,
Refusing to let them go.

It seems the time will never come.

So now that all the parks and boulevards
Look like wedding cakes
And the people do not understand 
How to leave a thing alone,

Even the awesome newness of a brand new mind
Feels sometimes like a useless thing,

And only the silence of no thoughts at all
Brings relief.



by Robert Hampton Burt
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