| About suffering they were never wrong, | |
| The Old Masters; how well, they understood | |
| Its human position; how it takes place | |
| While someone else is eating or opening a window or just walking dully along; | |
| How, when the aged are reverently, passionately waiting | 5 |
| For the miraculous birth, there always must be | |
| Children who did not specially want it to happen, skating | |
| On a pond at the edge of the wood: | |
| They never forgot | |
| That even the dreadful martyrdom must run its course | 10 |
| Anyhow in a corner, some untidy spot | |
| Where the dogs go on with their doggy life and the torturer's horse | |
| Scratches its innocent behind on a tree. | |
| In Breughel's Icarus, for instance: how everything turns away | |
| Quite leisurely from the disaster; the ploughman may | 15 |
| Have heard the splash, the forsaken cry, | |
| But for him it was not an important failure; the sun shone | |
| As it had to on the white legs disappearing into the green | |
| Water; and the expensive delicate ship that must have seen | |
| Something amazing, a boy falling out of the sky, | 20 |
| had somewhere to get to and sailed calmly on. | |