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.
