I Can See Clearly Now 
(Or: Through a Glass Darkly)

Hopelessly tangled in the heap of frames 
These cheap wire spectacles belonged to Hans.
There'll be no four-eyes jokes where he's gone now.
No cruel boys to break the glass in them.
His shop is closed, the window panes were smashed.
The stock was looted by the self-same boys —
The clever automata that he made,
A trapeze artist turning on a swing,
A bear with cymbals and a skating girl —
Yes, all his "children" in the cold outside.
The wooden drummer still performs a roll
As he is carried out. A dancing mouse
Dies in the gutter with a clockwork whirr.
Yes, much of it is crushed in the boys' haste.

Some toys are kept and later they are sold.
They pass through several hands. The price goes up.
The stamped initial H becomes a mark
That dealers treat with something like respect,
Although the real provenance is lost.
Collectors snap them up. They're far too good
To find their way, these days, into kids' hands.
Several Museums of Childhood bid for them.
Their wood and tin outlive the human span.

Poor Hans, sometimes it pays not to see much.
The fields of mud, the fences of barbed wire,
The crematorium was just a blur.
Par-blindness spared him much that sighted men
Would pay a little fortune not to see.
Myopic Hans goes stumbling to the light.
Anna who turned him down is with him now.
Beauty and ugliness meet the same end.