Making art
Why does God create the artist's soul?
Who, tortured, turns it inward
to reflect whether there is a god
and wonder why He made her
And struggles to sow in meager earth.
Would it not be better to be a dreamless laborer
who wipes the brow and returns home to sleep
And does not think of the machine till they wake
Or the doctor
Whose hand daily wields life and death
And who accepts both as our ends
Or the astronomer
Who tries to calculate what God cast in words
And falls upon infinite paradoxes,
But makes abstractions fathom the sky?
All these eat the honest returns of their effort
But the artist strives long to produce little
Or short to manufacture much
but derives only fleeting mania from her toil, and has no satisfaction
And must ape the motions of the other workers all the while
enduring the scorn of all
Till she dies in the same dust
with not half to show to her name.