On the Shame of Having a Body

 

One is tempted to be humiliated

By the wearing-out of flesh:

The falling hair, the weathering skin, the sag,

And other, nameless, cruelties of time –

 

As if there were great shame in being mortal –

A temporal being in a changing world –

A bubble in the flow of entropy

That slides the universe from dawn to dust.

 

But why should this be so? The same brute fact

That gives us birth and youth brings age and death;

And surely here the only shame is God’s

If all of this was His divine idea.

 

The rest of us wear the marks of travel, true,

And look like we live hard because we do.