Trees and Flowers
What rhythms have we now?
No crops here, no seasons, no weather, no harvest
Only a disaster now and then
Like a sentence with a period.
Our ecosystem, not even rats and pigeons
Flowers without pollinators, of no real use
Only pavement has use here
And palms, for the proper image.
Trees and flowers
the standard metaphors of poetry
vaster than empires, only fools make them
an emotion for each color of the rose.
But we know trees and flowers now
Trees grow high for death zones
To grab sun from the others and the undergrowth
Flowers are bribes for information.
Variation, and selection
Variation is a blind pratfall
Selection is something killing something else
That's why we're here. Trees, too.
But plants killing plants is different, for us
A slow-motion massacre, a secret war of codes
We move too fast now to see it
I miss a battlefield with bullets I can dodge.
Copyright 2000 Rich Puchalsky
E-mail: rpuchalsky@worldnet.att.net
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Last modified: June 10, 02000