Suite Q

1.                                                                                           

Weeds: shoots of soft green,

Unfurling in the meager loam,

Tender leaves you think you’ve seen,

Stalks raised raffishly towards heaven.

How worthy of a home

In your unused flowerpot.

They ask no care, which you haven’t got.

Instant garden.

Happy with a crack,

Half-mummified sod.

Weeds, too, must be cherished by God.

2.

Weeds: so hell-bent

They are on propagation,

Kinda like how we built a nation

After many deeds of war.

Not, that is, on careful cultivation

But on a continual supply of hopefuls

From every social stratum.

Suckers and criminals, yes; also the agile and clever.

As the country realized westward,

Dandies were exposed

As lily-livered,

The booksmart lost toes.

While others,

True of grit but without pedigree,

found purpose in the land, built log cabins

in stumpy clearings, shot varmints, became mothers,

farmers, wheelwrights, butchers, teachers, miners, widows.

The greening nation gathered the gainfully employed

Unto her breast.

Into the American landscape, previously devoid,

Went whitewashed churches

Among the larches, pines, cacti and maples.

If you slapped together two hotels, a bank and trust, saloons,

You could dub yourself a City, a -ville,

Build a jail

And schools to better the families

Riding in from somewhere,

Having learned along the way

Some Americans’ll rob you with a six-gun

And some with a feather pen

But that most enjoy fair play,

Are friendly, helpful, exult in crusty wit

Seem free of snobbery

And the original sin.

Good folk.

This is how we grew.

According to de Toqueville,

Early road-tripper from France,

The whole life of an American in those early years

was passed like a game of chance.

How much worse it would have been

without good neighbors.

3.

Weeds: every time I see a makeshift bower

I half expect that from the shoots

Will bloom some wildflowers.

I wish for something beautiful to rise

From a plant whose roots

Took hold in such forbidding soil.

But how often are you so pleasantly surprised

When you’ve spent no toil?

Time and again, those buggers,

outlast relentless sun and lack of water

Taking refuge in the shade

Of an unused trowel handle.

Yet they become less interesting.

Stems harden, lacquer like a beetle.

The petals, pistil, stamen,

when they emerge, look common

(Like someone you knew in high school

But didn’t keep in touch with

Who looks so different now)

As if to suggest that everyone has a greening season

but that weeds are weeds for a reason.

There’s a way you consider weeds—

Once you’ve made the distinction—

That’s opposed to the way you regard a flower.

Roses, pansies, calendula, etcetera, require tending.

Pruning, weeding, blood meal, soaking…

In return they bob gracefully along the picket fence

In light breezes, sparking admiration

And even, like petting a kitten, a sense of calm and happiness.

4.

Weeds, no matter what their hardiness

Or defiance of the odds might mean

Are met with indifference.

“Mama had a baby and her head popped off”

We said when we decapitated dandelions

Their necks oozing milk.

But to grab an iris or a beebom

And do the same would have seemed more like

An act of wanton destruction.

5.

Weeds: apt analogy for how they make you feel

Those velvet blooms so lush they loll.

Their progeny will bloom where they’re planted

in raised beds,

Little Mark and Marie Antoinettes.

You and me?

They have no gripe with

but they lack time, the bandwidth,

and curiosity.

Dismissed—swipe—

Even though, ‘neath our stems, we’re of the same pith.

A weed, spake Emerson,

At a packed town hall or Athenaeum,

Is a plant whose virtues have not yet been discovered.

(He’d be dismayed to learn

How few these days know from a transcendentalist

But that everyone knows the fundamentalist.)

Weeds subtly justify denial and injustice.

That the poor are milked,

As ants do aphids,

Seems inhumane unless you think of them like crabgrass

That jumped your wall,

Or as permanently shiftless,

Or can manage not to think of them at all.

6.

Weeds: grew in profusion

On the disused siding, telling their own story.

It was 1976, the Freedom Train was in town

Clackety-clacking all over the nation

To stations large and small.

For the price of admission

I imbibed the founding myth, its power and its glory,

Gawked at Washington’s copy of the Constitution

And tried to read it.

Numbly passed by MLK Jr.’s empty pulpit,

And wondered at a rock still fresh from the moon.

Automatic patriots

Outweighed the doubters then, it seemed.

You didn’t even have to be particularly well-informed.

When someone said shut up it was reflexive

To say, “Why? It’s a free country,”

And be prepared to back it up with fists.

To be a rebel was esteemed.

What the colonists

Who gave themselves to the War

had consigned to the weeds,

(along with monarchy),

Was smug faith in the superiority

Of certain opinions over others.

We were all sisters and brothers.

7.

Weeds: five decades on, I’m of an age.

Fibers are weaker, threat’ning betrayal.

Hair’s a former color.

Without glasses, words swim on the page

And hearing’s begun to fail.

Some of my notions belong in a museum.

But I’m shielded by my 1970’s breath of freedom.

There was something in the air

Amidst the inflation and embargos

A mix of struggle, will and devil-may-care

That made the Revolution seem not long ago.

The heirloom childhood

My generation lauds ad nauseum

Was as footloose as they say.

It engendered resilience, in its way.

We learned useful methods

Of denial, secrecy and evasion

—the ones at our disposal.

But against the forces that face the youth today

Our defenses were no better than our forts in the woods.

It’s every generation’s burden to worry over the next

Without crediting it enough for being elastic.

But what’s this slow-motion twister

That sucks up aspects of culture and context?

The unconventionally skilled or intelligent,

Who made this country best,

Grow up on meaner substance.

They get used to it,

Not knowing any better.

Is this deliberate?

Seems it’s possible to curb the appetite for transcendence

Without firing a shot.

At some point, without giving notice,

The Revolution’s fusillades and sacrifice grew distant.

Not too far into the recent past

We jettisoned some common decency—

The sympathetic goodhearted pang—

And are tossing after it the tools and the humility

Essential to our being.

Weeds divide the deserving from the undeserving

It’s a mistake we’ve made with confidence

From earliest colonial times:

The belief that those who prospered, God was rewarding,

The rest being unworthy, impure, or given to excess.

Concluding thus until it rhymed

Through generations of better-than-average success.

What made this country great

Were labor, smarts, broad oceans, machines,

Natural resources in abundance,

And the idea of freedom for me and thee

Which, once writ, and settled in blood,

Could not be gainsaid

No matter which side you butter your bread.

That this fair land, beautiful and vast,

By Providence was blessed

Is to be believed.

But neither she nor any of us got ahead by divine favor.

God doesn’t pick winners, or feel the need to reward them.

We won’t make it unless we’re in this together.

Thank God how lucky we are—

or lucky we have been.

Walk for a day in the mocs

Of your neighbor.

Go on, now, get your steps in.