I went back to the woods where I played
with grampa in the dunes near the lake
My mother goddess Lake Michigan
or the big lake gitchegumme to locals
this land was made for you and me
Houses sit and tarmac covers
where my wintergreen berries lived
drywall shacks that grew not from seed but
chewed up, used up, spat out natural resources
post-industrial waste of too much muchness
too many structures holding too few people
flimsy construction from destruction of
the Great Spirit Gluskabe's stately dunes
irreplicable, irreplaceable, unshakable
until the diesel breathing monster machines came
gorging themselves on magnetite, hematite and quartz
of prehistory older-than-ice-age sands
more non-renewable comrades fallen
Avē Imperātor, moritūrī tē salūtant
Extinct is forever and gone is for good
it made sense of a sort when there were jobs,
railroad, factories, newspapers, telephones
neighbors and communities. America WAS Great
now it's just glutinous and grasping
We build boxes to house bric-a-brac and junk
we buy too much of and don't need and
can't pay for and go bankrupt to have
and don't use and throw in landfills
already the size of small cities
useless crap to feed corporate and consumer greed
for things they will only destroy in a very short time
Woodsy used to say "give a hoot, don't pollute"
And we held hands and sang
if those poor owl could but see us now
ironic yard signs reading "no over development"
in over developed sub divisions with landscaped
marram grass where it once grew wild
ripped out to replant in its native habitat
Why?
signs preaching "keep off the dunes"
in the yards built on trashed dunes
and "dune preserve" preserved where?!
an asphalted over melted glacier Lake?
a concreted old growth back dune forest
of pine, fir, Eastern hemlock, spruce, trillium
lady slippers, wintergreen, protective mosses
oak, juniper, trilobite, petrified wood, fossils
ground to wood chips to decorate lawns
that smothered animal habitats that grew
where leaves and needles once blanketed
nothing remains except spent, sparse
scraps of tree cremains left where they are
till their spot is needed to build
some family an even bigger house
And the Lorax laments on...
that they aren't going to use
the divorce will be final before
she moves in, alone with her cat
kitchen larger than diners of childhood
sharing a cup they call loneliness
homes as large as tenement halls
contrast the shotgun singles of my youth
with a family of seven crammed
to the gills under one roof, comfortably
homes that house families of families
two bedroom homes, not houses
where people ate dinner at 5:30
around a Formica table in the kitchen
somehow they all miraculously fit
chewing their knees with their rolls
now the huge kitchens are decorated
with cookbooks and spices no one uses
and mass produced signs telling us to "Gather"
in empty rooms with no one to comply
Seeger, Baez, Dylan, Peter, Paul and Mary warned us
There's an enormous dining room with
table big enough to seat the Love Boat crew
it's covered with packed boxes
Each eats DoorDash in his room with 64" TV
Strangely Estranged, strangers called family
all that's in the commercial grade fridge
which could hold food for a battalion
is vodka, half a lime and a takeaway
her Prozac prescription and a tin for the cat
paradise was razed for that
working to pay off overpriced boxes
they were never satisfied with anyway
and soon they will move out and the
house will become another industrial sediment layer
crumbling my beloved dunes out from under
and they will gut someone else's childhood
to build their empty little boxes on
the hillside made of ticky-tacky
to house their knicky-knacky crap-y
and they all look just the same.
I want my berries back.
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