Sunday, July 3, 2011

New poem: Truce?

I hated lawn work growing up.
The forced, hot chore of green conformity.
Mule to a manual, rotary blade.
Slave to some dim, inbred, feeble sense that
we were long-lost, distant kin
to kings with gardens, gardeners and time.

Time to care for useless weeds.
Time to force conformity.
Time for our mad hierarchy
of measured, soft suburban warfare
fought with gestures, eyebrows, jokes and sighs.

You can't fight. At best you might
retreat the field for condo life or fob the job
on pros and neighbors' kids. But that's not peace.
The grass still wins.

Until the day she lay down flat, barefoot, stretched out
on her back, closed her eyes, tipped back
her head, sighed deeply, smiled and said,

"I love the feel of fresh-mown grass."

An armistice? Perhaps.