poem: High Towers and Low Bottoms

High Towers and Low Bottoms

Oh, the bottom land's rich, better crops never seen!
Prone to flood, perhaps, once harvest's brought in.
It's got natural compost, the best that there's been.

Your shoes cake with muck. Never mind it at all;
Bottomland's gooey between Spring and Fall.
Turn it with your mule, or a trusty Farmall.

But people seem to pop up faster than plants,
And the bottomland gains a hard coat and pants
Dipped in concrete by a horde of ants.

Teams of bright beetles push ever higher
Temples to commerce forged in a fire.
The ants keep on digging, as tycoons retire.

Tower after office tower with steady force
Pickets the banks and the watercourse.
Airplanes and trucks subdue the iron horse.

Still, for the pigeons, there's sunshine to spare,
But the crops gave up, without sunshine or air.
Away went the farmers, but no one knows where.

Through tunnel-like alleys, in cascading sheets,
It's water and flotsam and spirochetes.
There's no place for children to run through the streets.

But the uppercrust, blinded and too inbred,
Thinks it's beautiful -- peering from high overhead
At vital signs that cannot be read.

Chemical soup they refuse to smell,
Undrinkable water? Go find us a well!
We'll live up here, high above that hell.

One sees what one wants to see, nothing more.
There's nowhere left for the ants to bore.
Guess we'll have to get off at the second floor!

-- Leslie G. Harper
   July 24, 2008

poem: Dinosaur Footprints

Dinosaur Footprints

Villagers once sang and danced the Morris;
And gathered boughs and flowers for the May.
Their steps, and those of all who walked before us,
Replete with tunes and costumes, die away.
Homeric epics, flowery poems by Horace,
Like cities buried many layers deep,
Fine Grecian chairs, and polychromed amphoras
Fade like dreams when sunshine spoils our sleep.

The poetic histories of Apollodorus
Xenophon's work, a volume of Strabó.
Heródotus we have, and Diodorus,
And, likely altered, those of Manethó.
Ctesias' works have washed down the pylorus,
While winds debrided carvings off of cliffs.
Gone are cities to waves, to floods, to forests!
Caves hold the oldest, hidden petroglyphs.

Gone was the tune, the intro, verse and chorus,
Before archaeology rose to make its stand.
Sima Qian and Ouyang Xiu made way for us,
Shen Kuo proposed that time had lent its hand,
His fossils told of change events that bore us
From seashelled coast to inland high terrain,
From glades of bamboo, where the former shore was,
To arid climate or glacial moraine.

Othniel Marsh, archaeologist Ursae Majoris,
Brought in a beautiful skeleton with no head,
And so was born the mythic "Brontosaurus,"
That sported another species' skull instead.
The sparks flew, as if from an electrophorus.
But Othniel's earlier finds proved to be true:
So enter the elegant, huge, Apatosaurus
Whose top-nostriled head we almost never knew.

Scientists haven't always been decorous:
They've fiddled and twiddled ideas beyond the pale.
They tell us spacetime's one gigantic torus,
But it may be just a Brontosaurus' tail.

-- Leslie G. Harper
May 23, 2008

poem: Candy for the Bankrupt

Candy for the Bankrupt

Our cherished institutions fell, slammed to the ground
As their tickers were ripped from The Street.
CEOs levitated, employees got smacked down.
September's found its own trick-or-treat.

After life-long lupus, the corpus of capitalism
Coughed out its lungs to the ditch.
Limp, in a pox-ridden Indian blanket,
It cried for the Wicked Witch.

Tom Jefferson, Ben Franklin, Francis Scott Key
Would not understand our land of the free,
Strangled by loopholes and bloated budgets,
Insured from neck to knee.

We've deployed our teens, even parents with children
To chase wild terrorists to distant dens.
And we wave flags at home, in the Nazi tradition.
Nationalism will cow once-brave citizens.

Our national debt bubbles past ten trillions −
Lots of pork, grist, and eye of newt.
We'll eat spun crow and like it; lobby legions
Have double-doubled our mandrake root.

Now, when even children are growing up obese,
Eating trans fats, sugars and wheat,
We dress them like demons in eye-slaying colors
And tell them to go trick-or-treat.

There's nothing of value in a sub-prime mortgage
Or the fast track down the tubes.
All those candy highs are rendering us bankrupt,
A nation of glazed-over boobs.

                          -- Leslie G. Harper
                              September 26, 2008
 

poem: Making the World Safe for Thistles

Making the World Safe for Thistles

Teredos and gribbles demolish our docks,
Our pilings and coastal tideways.
Clearcuts make forest turn to rocks;
Mt. Saint Helens just slaps trees sideways.
As our tombstones are etched and landmarks spall,
As our lakes grow too acid for vultures,
Our heroic flora and fauna fall
And with them their tight-knit cultures.
Bolting up from the drouth, instead,
Rise determined species of thistle −
The "star," the "blessed," the "nodding head,"
With taproot and backpack missile.

Blind am I as the hurricane swash
That reduces motels to rubble.
With my brain as sharp as fresh gouache
I rub at my eyes and stubble,
And fancy I'll clear just one floppy disk
While struggling to greet the morning.
I'll push <delete> ... I ignore the risk ...
I click at the beeping warning.
Now whirring and scrubbing nudge at my head.
I inhale a nervous whistle.
All is gone, so quick, so frail, so dead!
If erasing don't scare me, this'll.

Paleface that settled in Terre Haute
Came on barks or the Yankee clipper.
The Atlantic they viewed as a mighty moat,
And Europe a cast off slipper.
Disease and the army removed strong nations
From vast deposits of loess,
Now fences and farms prevent migration,
Emprison the wilderness.
Gone are great bison and leached, good land,
And the farmers have hardened to gristle.
How a Dust Bowl could form they don't understand ...
If experience don't teach 'em, thistle.

King Ferdinand used overreaching means
To rout the last Moors from Granada.
Torquemada helped Spain expel the Jews,
Like Silva helped Rome at Masada.
Auschwitz now heads up that murderous line;
For Darfur our hearts grow spongy.
Do we notice how western Canadian pine
All drop dead from beetle-borne fungi?
Our air is a hideous nitrous brown
And its oxygen content suffers,
Wells become tainted and fishes drown,
Deprived of all natural buffers.

The dead and gone don't unerase.
Life can't be cloned from bristle.
All that can thrive in such blighted space
Are the likes of invasive thistle.

-- Leslie G. Harper
   July 17, 2005

poem: One-Eyed Shepherdess

One-Eyed Shepherdess

Neil Armstrong stepped down from the landing craft Eagle
       One step into dust − one step farther from Earth −
To our nursery-rhyme Moon with her cows and her fiddles,
       Who ratchets the tides at each delta, each firth.
None imagined what steps on that surface would augur
       That we're coming to take from her all she's worth.

From their test pilot training at the Edwards' lake bed
       Our new-minted astronauts headed to space
In the mold of old empires, of air force, of navy,
       With political dominance inked on each face.
We will lay waste our planet, we'll need a new homestead,
       So we'll pounce on the Moon when our air turns to paste.

She is covered in dust, with a positive charge
       That adheres, like lice, to all but herself.
Our Moon is quite black, but shines pale and large,
       And she harbors an acrid, cap-gun smell.
She see Earth as paradise, blue skied and argent −
       Of droughts and famines, Moon cannot tell.

We are bound with our Shepherdess in an embrace.
       She governs the cycles we cherish on Earth.
Many moons, she has led our errant race
       Of flat-footed monkeys, tailless at birth.
She has tried to inspire us to wisdom and grace,
       Foresight and reverence for all we're worth.

Our Shepherdess has a one-month blink.
       So intense are her passions, so one-eyed her glance,
She relies on her cohort to ponder and think.
       She beams on bare breasts and on new-fallen pants,
And seduces corallia to their mating dance,
       Unaware down on Earth, we're her fer-de-lance.

                        -- Leslie G. Harper
                            August 27, 2008
 

poem: I Am An American

I Am An American

An American flag makes its stand on my shelf;
Some "Vote For" buttons embellish my cap.
But what has befallen my cherished America
That took in refugees over four centuries? --
Motley collections of gentry, of inmates,
Desperate for tolerance, land, or adventure --
Pirates and trappers, Protestants, Catholics,
English, French, Spanish, Germans, Italians.
Merchants and scientists, Irish and Jews.

Wave upon wave, from Europe they flocked
To claw out new lives, to follow their gods,
To bring "civilization" without understanding.
Some thought the lands were there for the taking,
Some thought the natives were theirs for the breaking,
Some never questioned, or wondered, or thought.
But the natives were dying of smallpox and typhus,
So natives from Africa had to be bought.
And the noble masses that yearned to breathe free
Were smothering in holds of slavers' boats.

Two churning centuries raised expectations,
A new kind of life, a noble experiment.
Where turkeys still ruled over fields and barrens,
Up sprang new homesteads, then gracious mansions.
Where once had walked bison, beaver and bear,
Backyards were stacked with ax-split logs.
Yes, it was peaceful -- the slaves in their beds --
But "the land of the free" was riddled with lies.
Like Holsteins a-swaggering, flicking their tails,
And batting their lashes at noseeum flies,
Comfortable Americans, feeling quite civilized,
Distilled their grains and averted their eyes.

Came 1812, with conscriptions by England;
Francis Scott Key penned his four-verse poem.
While he watched for a Banner at Fort McHenry
He prayed for triumph in the land of the free.
He presumed our cause was just and unstained.
But America was marching, its focus was drifting,
Were we out to conquer Canada, drugged by Anácreon?

Our roads are replete with historical markers,
Of bloody battlefields, "hanging oaks";
Kudzu has crawled over countless graves
And buried the lessons we never learned.
Do we simply avoid them and notice nothing?
America the sanitized, America the brazen --
Not a regime I can feel proud of!
Yet it's pounding within me. I'm an American.!
Where is my country I deeply love?

We pledge allegiance with hand over heart,
Salute our forests, our wheat fields, our cactus,
Celebrate our Fourth and watch it all grow.
And aren't we the freest, all options open?
In my bygone days, oh, what did I know?
Ours such great splendor! But under the surface
Inhumanity and hatred received steady practice ...

Sixty years back, or seventy-five,
A different culture was then alive:
Cardinals' "Peews" and "Bwirdy bwirdy, bwirdy bwirdies"
And reedy "Ow-owdel-ows" of oldsquaw ducks
Echoed long distances over the ponds.
There were long evenings rocking, listening to katydids,
Eery "hoo-hoo"-ings of passenger trains,
America the frog-filled, the tranquil, the peaceful,
America the starry-eyed Cassiopeia.

We'd gather for picnics, smoke our own barbecue.
Uncles called squaredances, Grandpas played fiddle,
Quartets sang barbershop, some rousing gospel,
At church socials, hayrides ... don't forget sewing bees.
Then, we played baseball, read aloud poetry,
Visited cousins and played the piano.

We all knew our neighbors and everyone's relatives,
Pitched in to help for illness and funerals.
Cared for our cousins as if they were brothers,
Back in America, America the neighborly.
How the future twisted in the years ahead:
Born on third base with a mouthful of corn flakes --
It's so un-American to live spoon-fed!
Is this what Big Agro has brought us to?

Hardly a person seems to be worried
That lobbyists chipped all our greatness away.
Can I join a chapter of Americans Anonymous,
Rekindle the dreams from my bygone days?
Can I plow and plant a big family garden?
Zoning and hi-rises take that away!
Here in the city, we tolerate no chickens,
No self-sufficiency, just proud compliance.
Pay, if you want to relearn how they did it --
How homesteads survived, let alone flourished,
Made their own tools, sewed their own clothing.
Too late to go back -- it just gets more crowded.
America's drowned in a world grown more crooked.

Ah! but we've learned, through our DNA,
That race never had any basis in fact,
We've been cousins to neighbors we never knew.

Crazy Horse' statue will some day break loose
To rear up in a rage for his native land --
For his peoples extinguished or sent into poverty.
"See what these immigrants did to my country!"
America the two-faced, America the stolen,
Land of broken treaties and forkéd tongues.
But the great chief may hear only pain and confusion,
"O say, what awards has this Crazy Horse won?"

- Leslie G. Harper
April 25, 2008