Sleeping With The Doves In Paradise Poem by Mark Heathcote

Not everybody eats cornmeal bread
Not everybody needs a silver spoon.
Subsistence is whatever leaves you fed, half-filled
Whatever you've got, you've learned to survive.

Not everybody cares about a leaky roof or shoe
Whatever they've endured somehow makes them more.
Not everybody howls - cries at a full moon
Some live their life as pure joy in the Garden of Eden.

Not everybody, not everybody has a picket fence a front door
A vaulted place to keep things in store
A prayer a voice trembling on an autumn leaf about to fall
A whisper is a meadow of skylarks and a dream still fading
Not everybody wants to be captains and kings.

Not everybody has a place for harps and violin strings
Not everybody seeks applause and praise, as proof
Not everybody needs a fairy-tale a frog prince
There are those with almost two, full good hearts-

Living their days like Sundogs, in the shadows
Without a bed or a blanket just, glad to be alive.
Sleeping like drifting clouds with the doves in paradise
Stretched out like rainbows, wherever it rains, and
And bends the wheat; without, breaking.