Poetry Explorer- Classic Contemporary Poetry, ORPHAN BORN, by ROBERT JONES BURDETTE


Poetry Explorer

Classic and Contemporary Poetry

ORPHAN BORN, by                     Poet's Biography
First Line: I am a lone, unfathered chick
Last Line: My incubator.
Subject(s): Birds; Birth; Orphans; Child Birth; Midwifery; Foundlings


I AM a lone, unfathered chick,
Of artificial hatching,
A pilgrim in a desert wild,
By happier, mothered chicks reviled,
From all relationships exiled,
To do my own lone scratching.

Fair science smiled upon my birth
One raw and gusty morning;
But ah, the sounds of barnyard mirth
To lonely me have little worth;
Alone am I in all the earth --
An orphan without borning.

Seek I my mother? I would find
A heartless personator;
A thing brass-feathered, man-designed,
With steam-pipe arteries intermined,
And pulseless cotton-batting lined --
A patent incubator.

It wearies me to think, you see --
Death would be better, rather --
Should downy chicks be hatched of me,
By fate's most pitiless decree,
My piping pullets still would be
With never a grandfather.

And when to earth I bid adieu
To seek a planet greater,
I will not do as others do,
Who fly to join the ancestral crew,
For I will just be gathered to
My incubator.





Discover our Poem Explanations and Poet Analyses!


Other Poems of Interest...
Home: PoetryExplorer.net