Thus the years open, each of them in turn,
endlessly blooming flowers of transiency.
Their ceaseless passing is of no concern,
for time no longer means a thing to me.

I have a treasure of eternal worth:
a guardian heart which -- girded against harm --
gazes on heaven but is content with earth,
and views the threatening fog without alarm.

'Always be tough!' they tell me. 'Hold your own!'
But I would rather live and feel and see --
even when this earns me men's antipathy --

than be a hollow half-decayed sheepbone,
hidden by pack-train boys in piles of stone,
stuffed full of slander and obscenity.