Here's first a gloveless hand warm from my pocket, <br />A perch and resting place 'twixt wood and wood, <br />Bright-black-eyed silvery creature, brushed with brown, <br />The wings not folded in repose, but spread. <br />(Who would you be, I wonder, by those marks <br />If I had moths to friend as I have flowers?) <br />And now pray tell what lured you with false hope <br />To make the venture of eternity <br />And seek the love of kind in wintertime? <br />But stay and hear me out. I surely think <br />You make a labor of flight for one so airy, <br />Spending yourself too much in self-support. <br />Nor will you find love either, nor love you. <br />And what I pity in you is something human, <br />The old incurable untimeliness, <br />Only better of all ills that are. <br />But go. You are right. My pity cannot help. <br />Go till you wet your pinions and are quenched. <br />You must be made more simply wise than I <br />To know the hand I stretch impulsively <br />Across the gulf of well-nigh everything <br />May reach to you, but cannot touch your fate. <br />I cannot touch your life, much less can save, <br />Who am tasked to save my own a little while.<br /><br />Robert Lee Frost<br /><br />http://www.poemhunter.com/poem/to-a-moth-seen-in-winter/
