Graphic by Yujin Kim/The Choate News They stab the earth,
Those cold, metal-souled sticks of iron,
Which hold up our vineyards
And towers but penetrate the ground,
Knife-wound after bullet-wound.
The weeds are signs of despair
And desperation,
Crawling out from shadows and dirt and
Tumbling over each other in an attempt
To cry out, “Stop, stop!”
But with deaf ears and
A blind eye, we rip the weeds
Out of the earth that slips further
Everyday from the sun.
We rip the weeds away so that
They may not “poison” factory flowers
And metal mountains.
No one can be called innocent anymore.
Squirrels burrow under
Yet we dig them up and wave
Eviction notices in their frantic black eyes.
The sea boils, the sun
Mixes with the moon,
But we don’t notice.
It’s a terrifying thing, the
World is. The machine world, I mean.
Grey and sour and stupid in its ignorance among
The shadow of humaneness, glued to the
Ground but barely, waiting horridly
For a gust of manmade wind to sweep
The beauty and nakedness of a mind down into the
Underworld, with all the other
Monsters made real by imagination.
Magic still exists, in
Birdsong and deer hooves, living next to
The malice of men’s metal minds
That dream of unreal and impossible worlds.
