Destiny

A noisome thing that crawls by covert path,
For glad, unfearing feet to lie in wait;
No part in summer’s fellowship it hath,
From mirth and love and music alienate.

Yet once it flashed across the close, brown grass
In the noon sun, and, as it quivered there,
The spell of beauty over it did pass,
Making it kin with earth and light and air.

I knew that Life’s imperial self decrees
That this, the loathliest of living things,
By patient ways of cycled centuries,
Slow creeping, shall at last attain to wings.