The Foundling's Doom Poem by Robert Rorabeck

Young life is born in the morning,
And with it the pain which brings it across:
There it is out in the field
Gamboling on four unsteady legs
In between the briars and the wholesome sky:

The wolves come waiting in
The lines of hunger’s prowling,
And the talons circle in a blue abyss:
Already the pestilent eyes are wanting,
All the little bits of life they can scent on the bud:

For the foundling’s doom is underfoot,
The winter’s creep, the thistle’s snare,
The snaggletooth grin insincerely basking in sunlight:
The farmer is too busy with his own affairs
To know the way the weevils go sowing his field:

The colt has done good to make it this far,
To breath from the larger womb,
The great urn the natives spoke of and worshiped,
And the bucolic sphere that kindles life and snuffs it out:

Too early to defend itself,
To take up and learn the sport of man and beast:
Just a young thing, a simple kid
Upon the fold of the agrarian and the boreal,
He bounds lushly before the insatiable gazes,

As he lifts his head to begin to suckle the sensitive tit,
His mother nuzzles the air warily, sensing foul:
And already the gyre begins the whirring:
The roll of dice for the pleasure’s feast,
And the borders come pouncing inwards upon
That green loci of uneasy rest.