Everyone should be born happy

         and loving everything.

     But in truth it rarely works that way.

     For myself, I have spent my life clamoring toward it.

     Halleluiah, anyway I'm not where I started!

 

     And have you too been trudging like that, sometimes

         almost forgetting how wondrous the world is

         and how miraculously kind some people can be?

     And have you too decided that probably nothing important

         is every easy?

     Not, say, for the first sixty years.

 

     Halleluiah, I'm sixty now, and even a little more,

         and some days I feel I have wings.