It hurts

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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.

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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.