Dad’s Post-Mortem Birthday Poem
The heat that comes in a single click
Signals summer in mid-spring.
Where joggers drip in humid sweat
While forest snow still sticks.
Then Peggy takes a Caddy ride
For a pack of cigarettes,
And entrepreneurs pollute us all
Without an ounce of regret.
Then an earth toad pops up from below
To lift your evening mood,
And Catholics follow human trends
To reduce the size of their brood.
As greed impoverishes locals
And distant workers alike,
A union of post-Reagan thinkers
Bundles their children onto their bikes.
Just when, in defiance of Adam Smith
Prices grow a life of their own,
The buy-nothing revolution
Buys food that is locally grown.
Perpetual war is now creeping
Into a bulging world war three,
While yuppies teach children farming
In the land of the spoiled and the free.
