Rude Awakening

Rude Awakening

The first day of an early spring has come

and I've gone out walking

to welcome again the touch

of friendly air on my skin,

to experience, by sense of smell,

the rebirth of the earth.

It is a time when Nature appears at her best,

the transition between Earth's night and day.

Lovely in their extremes, mixed

in the magic of vernal chemistry

they become a new, volatile substance,

as insistent, as fecund, and as fleeting as adolescence.

It is also a time when that paradoxical prodigy of Nature,

homo sapiens, appears at its worst,

and is recognizable as still in transition

from a scarcely sapient past

to some perhaps Palladian future.

I see seasonal signs of my species

exposed between melted snow

and the green growing camouflage

the earth sends up to hide its shame

in its sons' and daughter' mean Malthusian mess.

Sundry bottles formerly filled with Faustian brew

erupt like festers on skin pulled tight

by wind and cold.

Styrofoam sheep graze futilely on brown grass

until, carelessly corralled, they become

insoluble stains on the tentative tapestry.

Wrappers relate a monotonous masque

in a crude cadence of cellophane, cardboard and plastic.

Who is it that casts away so easily

the modern miracles of man,

and in the same motion

throws off the thin mantle of humanity

that relates them ever so speciously

to Beetoven, Einstein and Thoreau?

Who is it for whom "mindless"

is a mere matter of fact;

whose scurrilously scattered spoor leaves a trail

difficult for a city slicker to miss;

who has such slight respect for heritage or harmony;

who will have his or her freedom as a

hedge against reality-----without responsibility?

Whoever they are, they are to humanity

what their trash is to the landscape on which it lies-

aberrations, abscesses, feckless flaws,

that will be overgrown as Nature advances,

but are, nevertheless, of immediate consequence

as they spoil the perfection of

an early spring walk.