Today's poem contains some thoughts about what has happened to so much of our land ... thoughts driven largely, I suppose, by my having grown up in a rural area, where the poor, worn-out soil was gentled into producing food and flowers.
I have no special agenda, no axe to grind ... just some observations that simply came to me on a rainy day in a shopping center parking lot.
I may be wrong about grasses someday retaking "these smothered acres."
I take no comfort in the possibility that I might be right. Right or wrong, I shall never know, but it seems logical, reasonable to expect that the sprawl of what we've come to treasure as our way of life cannot be sustained forever.
Something to think about, perhaps.
The poem:
NEW GROWTH
Where crops once grew,
the skin of commerce
stretches into the distance,
acres in all directions.
On verdant prairie land
now grow waving fields
of carts, cars and customers.
They bring the green
to a soil long bereft
of plants, except token trees
planted as memorials
to what once was.
And when it rains, the rain
finds no welcoming soil.
It piles up at the drains
as it flees this alien surface.
What strange things
we now grow, and
how great the cost.
Someday the grasses
will retake
these smothered acres,
rightfully theirs
by prior claim.
The rain will come
in its gentle way
to bless this soil,
and it will prosper
as it did before.
© 1996
(originally published in Poetic Eloquence)
Today's word: smothered
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