us chickens

Whatever sense of life one has, it seems to me qualified by the literal biological thing we are, and by the fact that, though we may presume differences between us, we're basically, like chickens, not a wildly various life form. Our repetitions are bleakly notorious in every sense. But a world is, as it turns out, in the very word that says it, a "vir (man)-eld (age)," the length of a human life--and what one takes that as being, and what relations one feels it to have or works to accomplish: That's it entirely. If there is a world of insistent pain and poverty and despair, it is a human one. That I have never been able to forget.  

Robert Creeley in Take My Advice: Letters to the Next Generation from People Who Know a Thing or Two [Thank you, Ms. Popova]