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