Classic Poem

I am a lone, unfathered chick,
Of artificial hatching,
A pilgrim in a desert wild,
By happier, mothered chicks reviled,
From all relationships exiled,
To do my own lone scratching.

Fair science smiled upon my birth
One raw and gusty morning;
But ah, the sounds of barnyard mirth
To lonely me have little worth;
Alone am I in all the earth—
An orphan without borning.

Seek I my mother? I would find
A heartless personator;
A thing brass-feathered, man-designed,
With steam-pipe arteries intermined,
And pulseless cotton-batting lined—
A patent incubator.

It wearies me to think, you see—
Death would be better, rather—
Should downy chicks be hatched of me,
By fate's most pitiless decree,
My piping pullets still would be
With never a grandfather.

And when to earth I bid adieu
To seek a planet greater,
I will not do as others do,
Who fly to join the ancestral crew,
For I will just be gathered to
My incubator.