An Ordinary Life

An ordinary life on the face of it...
(though he was from a wealthy family).
He spent an easy youth
lounging around, getting educated

learning the social graces and
the popular sports that young men play
when they are rich and haven't much
else to do with their time but play.

A protected childhood, you might say.
And it was, it overflowed
with love and pleasure, and he
never knew real workers working

or people, hungry and poor,
cripples of age and the body's pain
shuffling through their ordinary lives,
on, and over the edge of death.

He married, settled, had a son.
Never really had to work;
his parents lavished things on him.
Life was comfortable and sweet.

Then one day, driving through the town,
maybe not in his usual mood
he heard, as he had never seen,
the endless moan of human pain
in the faces that he saw.

For a while he seemed withdrawn,
connecting himself to the new facts:
"Is this going to happen to me?"
Then one day he just walked out.

Wandered around trying to find
someone who'd tell him his vision was
not true, not final and absolute.
He begged for food or went without,
tortured his body with questioning.

No-one satisfied him after years
of asking. No-one could still
the pain in him of others' pain.

A thin disreputable tramp,
chased away for begging food,
he found himself at his road's end where,

having no-where else to go,
he set himself to answer himself
or die, whichever came first.

The world he came back to
was different for his return.
The rest is history and is in the texts.