Cave Dwelling

To live within a cave is not so good.

All sights and sounds of men are thereby barred

Save at one port that opens to the light.

Life in the round cannot be understood

By any  troglodyte.

 

If one should pass, a walker on the shore,

He is a shadowed silhouette, no more;

The outline of a being cut in card.

 

What though security is at one’s back

And shelter overhead,

This is existence that is three parts dead.

The sun for such a man makes little track,

His day is but a lessening of night.

 

Yet many live like this, though they are loud

In their denial, heeding not the shade

Upon them laid;

Moving anonymously in a crowd,

Single, alone,

Imprisoned in a self more hard than stone.