Trees are lucky because they barely sense a thing.
Stones, as well, because they're hard, beyond all feeling.
No pain's greater than the pain of being aware.
Human consciousness produces the worst despair.
To be, yet know nothing with no clear way to go,
the fear of having been, a future terror, too,
the unerring dread of being dead tomorrow,
and suffering through life and through shadows and through
the unknown and what one cannot anticipate,
the temptation of flesh, the fresh fruit still to come,
our tombs and the memorial laurels that await,
not knowing where we're going
or even where we're from!