An Attempt at Elegy

Poetry is not my forte, but I haven't yet been able to spin this into a story:

I spent the day planting flowers, natives such as milkweed

to attract pollinators -- bees and Monarchs.

The neighbors cut two trees down,

I saw the void when I came home.

When I came home from planting flowers

for butterflies and bees.

In a book about beavers, and how critical they are to saving the planet,

I read a quote, "when you're down to trying to save the insects,

you know you're buggered."

It had inspired me to plant the flowers,

because trees take so long to grow.

I walked in my neighborhood of "well-maintained" lawns.

The sidewalks are covered with fluorescent fertilizer pellets

to keep the grass an artificial green. 

Gas-powered mowers growled, motors trimming, manicuring. 

When Bradbury talks of colors, he describes carnivals and soda fountains,

but he can describe the snow, the way it curls upon branches

and crunches underfoot, as if it had all the vividness of a rainbow.

What memories will children of today have to pull from if

they are to write? Will they describe spring's confetti snow, dispensed

from plastic bins on wheels -- will the white stuff have gone extinct,

victim to hungry, thirsty demands from "well-maintained" lawns?

Lawns free from carbon-absorbing, oxygen-expelling trees.

I watched an advertisement for a university -- human population worldwide

to soar past 10 billion people in such and such year and there's no more land to plant more farms, 

to grow more food, so we need you (and you need us) -- to major in such and such

to innovate a way to solve the impending crisis, to grow food in labs 

under lamps. 

Imagine

the salary you'll make in this lucrative career -- saving humanity.

Just pay us a house-mortgage in tuition dollars first.

Wouldn't it be more sustainable to produce less people? If in two, maybe three decades 

we were down to four billion people. We'd relieve the pressure on the farms, 

and it would save the land -- assuming we hadn't yet over-farmed the soil.

I planted flowers today to save the bees and butterflies.

The Monarchs are dying off. 

I've seen the dead bees on the sidewalks, watched them writhing

killed from some pesticide or other. 

Helpless. 

Me and the bees.

Sherbet colored drops strewn across the pavement. Who has the time to sweep them off? 

Let the rain fall and do the work, let the water wash the rainbow sprinkles down the street, 

into the gutters, the sewers,

into the streams and creeks and lakes and oceans 

where we get our water

and our food. 

Food we'll have a desperate shortage of several years from now.

The neighbors said the trees had gotten too big, were too close to the house.

I was there when they planted the saplings in the spots they chose. I watched the trees grow.

I walk through the neighborhood. 

I see trees of green -- one day victims too. And I think to myself.

There aren't many flowers anywhere.