Jeff McCallum

I guess I can not go too long wit out a good rave after all.  Reading Stone's recent article  on the oil war got me diving into old rants. The Bush Cheney cheesy yellow bellied Democrat news has been too disgusting for me to bother starting a new one.

Amber Fields of Grain

Snow dusted fields glimmer like lakes

the gently rolling prairie an undulating ocean

Driving the fall furrowed North Dakota plain

I recall endless fields of Saskatchewan wheat

enough to feed the cattle

enough to feed our world

The Thirties will soon be only a good book

or ancient history

Farming is a science now

Norman Borlag a savior

Only in nightmares of nuclear desolation

or the quiet nagging of carbon dioxide

do we imagine this land barren

dry

dead

fished out like the blue blue ocean

picture postcard villages languishing

suffering the slow death

vessels and crew in permanent dry-dock

or posted

DANGER DO NOT EAT

fish from here more that once a month even if you’re poor and hungry

especially if pregnant

OFF LIMITS

like the quiet green bank at the bend on the river below the dam

or the clam beds in the back water bays of northern Washington

I wonder if the signs are in Somali or Hmong

Here there are not a million needles dripping poison into the helpless veins

of every stream and river

No cities dump raw sewage in the bays

away from the tourist beaches and luxury hotels

Barges do not set sail at midnight

weeping cargo deemed as useless as yesterday’s news

as deadly as gossip

to be magically disappear

some where beyond the twelve mile limit

Medical waste does not wash up on these gentle furrows

only snow

No

this land is far from the army of trash trucks queuing

like bees at the entry to the hive

to deposit poison pollen in the methane pools called landfills

or under the tall stacks of the incinerator

that politically proper

heats several city blocks

never burping unsightly smoke

I wonder

when I see the bird headed oil wells pumping

bobbing up and down like a dime store novelty

if they too are poison

killing the earth like the Valdez

only quieter

Wonder

seeing myriad cows in a cage like refugees in a tentless camp

what really happens to the waste they need permits to pool

in cement lagoons

posted

NO SWIMMING

Wonder

what they will post where we bury the undying waste

from the plants that spend nuclear fuel

like we use credit cards

They can’t use the fertilizer from the compost plant for people crops

too dangerous for pregnant women and small children

it goes on the ground to grow hog food

so they say

the rain drives it deep

seeing no difference