The Grey and The Green

Outside my window, a pneumatic drill
is trying to drown out the elegant trills
and whistles of gentle and beautiful birds
so that the sweet voice of the spring can’t be heard.

They’re fixing a hole in the road that they built
to bury a flowering meadow of green.
Their grim grey is everywhere. It makes my soul wilt
and my heart long for the old wild world, pure and clean.

Men with their hard hats and even harder hearts
building walls to keep me and nature apart;
men on towering scaffolds like skeletal births
building eyesores to obscure the sun from the earth.

But I won’t be locked in their grey orphanage.
My mother’s the Earth and I’ll stay by her side;
keep that eternal bond that this grim, awful age
of concrete and steel can never divide.