Certain Families

Certain families smell rank, nasty.

Affections in certain families

are like men seeking warmth

in a manure heap.

The things in those families

are like snakes running up a dead tree.

The mutual help in certain families

clings to each member like soaked clothes.

Too crowded are such families

to give any space to love.

In certain families

the face of beauty is darkened:

a rag dirty with a thousand ways of dirt

covers up beauty's face.

But there are families where the head

is like a great oak tree.

Those families grow beneath the sun

like a group of buttercups.

And they are beautiful in the eyes of God,

and they are beautiful in the eyes of men.