would it not be difficult

'I Chop Some Parsley While Listening to Art Blakey's 

Version of Three Blind Mice' 

 

And I start wondering how they came to be blind. 

If it was congenital, they could be brothers and sister, 

and I think of the poor mother 

brooding over her sightless young triplets. 

 

Or was it a common accident, all three caught 

in a searing explosion, a firework perhaps? 

If not, 

if each came to his or her blindness separately, 

 

how did they ever manage to find one another? 

Would it not be difficult for a blind mouse 

to locate even one fellow mouse with vision 

let alone two other blind ones? 

 

And how, in their tiny darkness, 

could they possibly have run after a farmer's wife 

or anyone else's wife for that matter? 

Not to mention why. 

 

Just so she could cut off their tails 

with a carving knife, is the cynic's answer, 

but the thought of them without eyes 

and now without tails to trail through the moist grass 

 

or slip around the corner of a baseboard 

has the cynic who always lounges within me 

up off his couch and at the window 

trying to hide the rising softness that he feels. 

 

By now I am on to dicing an onion 

which might account for the wet stinging 

in my own eyes, though Freddie Hubbard's 

mournful trumpet on "Blue Moon," 

 

which happens to be the next cut, 

cannot be said to be making matters any better. 

 

 [Billy Collins {1941- } 'I Chop Some Parsley While Listening to Art Blakey's Version of Three Blind Mice' from Sailing Alone Around the Room: New and selected poems]