And all these squalid millions firthing around on all fours
eating the grass, lips smack-stained with green,
skin scarning with pests.  Every potato has got pests,
pests crawling the wrinkled skin, falling in the stew;
no remedy, no balm, no psalm stands proud and tall to wick
away the sick that rims each ounce of crop.
And all these squalid millions I cannot recognize
though they are my brothers and my sisters.  Holy hordes
sordidly hoarding onto hope—I cannot breathe watching,
I did not mark my arms for this.  I took stakes
through limbs for your sake,
and still you salt the fields of my kin.
I cannot begin to bear the products
of your stilted logic: People thin as thatch; belt-bruises
scathing the sinless-skin of an emerald nation.
You blight fields, you blight the mothers’ sleep-strapped eyes,
you dirty mine’s womb with your sickly white.
Bitterbugs envelope a people as locusts
nested the skin of the Egyptians as water
bogged down the countrymen of Moses as fires
played and still play love to the bodies of the Sodomites.
The Whore Babylonia has seen your embers
too many times before, gently flaking
over the fields of the fallen, over the fields
of diseased potatoes.  Father, please leave this happy home
where you fist-choke your most devoted babies.
It is not your fault, Lady of Clover-Skin, I say,
and still she insists she simply fell down stairs.