Pavement eclipsed by a discarded wrapper's
identity: bright yellow with bold flecks
of red and white: a crushed petal of vice
disrupting the whole street's serenity.
It has fallen from impenitent little hands
long lost in the whirl of childhood lusts:
ashes and cinders of what has burnt out,
what would have thrilled the child it never knew:
rewards a child may gain from the wide world,
to tingle the dreamer or waken the genius
within itself: to carefully prepare
by the forty-day fast, the hundred fold!
So they told us: stop! and the gates will open:
so they were told; and so the cities grew.
