123 - May 2 2024 - a bad exchange

I turn upon a rainy day
toward the glass that keeps me dry
and feel content right now that I
am warm, and I am civilized

How wretched it would be, I think,
to be a beast and be exposed,
with weather hanging off my fur
and with this cold immobilized

I know not how, out in the fields,
they stand there, seeming quite unfazed,
by the relentless misery
of Zeus’s every enterprise

Perhaps it is an artifice
and my complacency is flawed:
for they keep strong, while I grow weak
assenting to this compromise