On Tending Lawn In The Era of George Bush

[Image from knowingthese.blogspot.ca]

Ah, when you have your own blog you can publish anything you like. How liberating. The tyranny of The Other, overthrown. Here is a parody of Robert Frost's wonderful poem Mending Wall that no one except you and I has ever read.

I wrote this some years ago, in deep despair [as who wasn't in those days, before Barack Obama taught us how stupidly gullible we had always been, before we were all just resigned to the dull ways of this world, when we still clung with such simple and naive hope to the belief that things would eventually get better?] after the casual killer George Bush Jr. had– incomprehensibly to all non-Americans– been invited to blunder his way through a second term as US president.

Enjoy.

                       Tending Lawn [in the Era of George Bush Jr.]

                        
                        Something there is that doesn’t love the wild
                        That thrives in Other’s houses and their lawns
                        And spews its vile seed forth in the wind,
                        And brings unwelcome Chaos to our lives.
                        The work of insects is that kind of thing:
                        I must go after them and make repair
                        Where they have left not one blade on my lawn
                        But they will not come running out of hiding
                        To help my killing work. The bugs I mean,
                        No one else knows they live or cares they live,
                        But all through my life I have sensed them there.
                        I ask my neighbor to help with killing;
                        If any day we meet between our homes
                        And point out the disorder as we talk.
                        To each the vermin that fall to either.
                        And some are huge, and some so hard to see
                        They must be the devil's to have survived here:
                        "Go forth, oh Fiends, and multiply on lawns!"
                        I wear my fingers rough with killing them.
                        It is not just a kind of old man's game,
                        My fight against Them. It means something more:
                        Where Others thrive I should not need to point:
                        My neighbour should see that order's breaking down.
                        My good advice will never get across
                        And save that mad chaos that he calls a life.
                        I only know good killing means good living.
                        Spring is the mischief in me, and I wonder
                        If I could put that notion in his head:
                        "Why can't you make a nice lawn? Isn't it
                        Order you crave? And here you have a chance.
                        Before I'd buy again I'd ask to know
                        What kind of killing all my neighbours do.
                        And if they knew which Others give offense.
                        Something there is that doesn't love what lives,
                        That wants it dead." I could say 'Us' to him,
                        But it's not just Us I know, and I'd rather
                        He said it for himself. I watch him now,
                        Playing with his children, with one small one
                        In each arm, laughing as their life runs wild.
                        I am alone; I have no time for play,
                        Or love or friends or laughs or carefree times.
                        They do not understand what living is.
                        I say again, "Good killing means good living."