When did I first know
I was superior,
A creature of wisdom and dismay,
An animal who knew he was an animal
But that every animal is in his way?
Who knew the moon and the leaf
Were like wine-drinking friends,
But that the leaf and the other things
Belongs to everything that ends?
I hoped, but hoped inside my sad mortality.
It might have been when I loved the world—as it refused to love me.
I think it was when I saw complexity
As simplicity
And this simplicity felt divine
And not only did I feel this; it was mine.
Divinity belonged to me as my pleasure,
Which increased in poetry and music’s measure
In the precise manner I sang my song
To you. So for once I might belong.
