Thou sleeping turds, whom Autumn's shovel finds:
Awake! And roll into the garden beds.
Fine products of my horses' warm behinds,
In half a year you'll feed the flower heads.
Through winter's cold in crystals you will wait,
for Spring's young sun to warm the soil again;
Your envious siblings stay within the gate
to be no more than more mud in the pen.
But you shall know the sunlight and the rain,
the shovel's blade, the probing of the worm;
the very microbes from your help will gain,
and through you will the Summer see her term.
Thus I submit you to the tiller's blade;
a year from now, we'll know what we have made.