It hurts

That sound hurts.

Each time it’s heard,

My heart feels wounded

For my beloved, benevolent earth

That gets bruised

By that machine that runs on gas.

It runs almost every other day in spring

After cool nights, and showers of mist

After thunderous nights magically filled with rain,

They come out and shout loud

‘We want to nip the buds’, they clamor

‘We want to mow the lawns’, they roar

All along they spew smoke;

And that disturbs me terribly.

  

Wherever I travel in America,

There are lawns,

And, there are lawn mowers,

We burn 800 million gallons of gas each year

For keeping our grassy yards trimmed

Our oil spills in our beautiful gardens

Put together are more than what Exxon Valdez

Spilled in the Gulf of Alaska

Come summer, when showers are far and few,

A million sprinklers come on, to wet and water

Many millions of gallons of precious water

Are employed in this act of watering vast lawns

When half the world bleeds for a drop of water

Connect the dots to another macabre picture

And there we find the noxious weed killers

Every year over many million poisonous pounds

We sprinkle on lawns, playgrounds and golf courses.

Take 30 commonly used lawn pesticides;

19 are linked with cancer,

13 are linked with birth defects,

21 with reproductive effects,

26 with liver or kidney damage,

15 with neuro-toxicity, and

11 with disruption of the hormonal system

17 are detected in groundwater,

23 have the ability to seep into drinking water sources,

24 are toxic to fish and other aquatic organisms,

11 are toxic to bees, and

16 are toxic to birds.

Why, even the brightest dandelions,

Those pretty flowers that cheer me up,

Are not spared either

Children play on these lawns

On these smoke-spewing, toxic yards

My heart misses a beat

For them, and for the earth

That we may not really leave behind for them and theirs.