His best, after years of toil,
Was mediocre.
The prodigy,
At the age of sixteen,
Could write better poems,
Albeit rife with thou and thy
At all the wrong grammatical places.
He would spend years,
Rewriting his poems,
Five, ten, fifteen drafts
And no sooner make a poem
Of average quality.
The prodigy,
In a matter of three days
Wrote a poem triumphantly
More exquisite, rich and deep
Than any poem he had ever toiled masterfully over
For his seventy-five years of life.
He, however,
Was paid to write his mediocre poems.
The prodigy,
Like all great sages in an illiterate age,
Was not. Except to pass down knowledge
To the generations after him.
Certainly, both were remembered
For a very long time.
Certainly, both gained their treasure.
However, it was unfortunate
That time had displaced the better of the two.
B. K. Neifert 