Mortgaged
Bright-faced flowers and bushes circle these old foundations,
the way wagons rolling West once curved in defense of life and limb.
This is the country where seasons still bloom from memory to hope.
Settlers have put down 30-year stakes and nested here on the
well-kempt streets, caped inside green yards played by stair-step
next generations, romping with their furry side-kicks.
Weekdays childish hordes grab lunch boxes decorated with
super heroes, stuffed with PB&J’s, and run for a bus to that place
where they are all taught to count on the future.
Weekdays Moms and Dads back out of the driveway,
bearing lunch in a brown paper sack. Frugal and reasonable, they
support the PTA, make work happen, help neighbors, and pay on time.
For this crime of naïveté all stand in contempt, and are
accused of harboring the ‘American Dream’. Guilty of
trust and that silly old belief in the law, these little people have
Mortgaged it all to powers housed far from the family place,
in great skyscrapers of marble, steel and glass fed by
concrete streets and elevators that rise higher than ethics.
There nothing but a faceless number in a computer knows
their address, their name. The only thing green is plastic,
% interest is the only crop; and honesty died with the Pilgrims.
Even then some insider with options back-dated, off-shore shells, birthday parties
where the ice statues piss champagne, and bonuses for failure and greed,
is stealing their last identity for quick sale on the internet.
______© Val Morehouse, September 2008
poetry
writing and poetry
Popping pills? Suicide? Lethal injections? These are reasons given [CC Times, 11/6/2007, A1] for two mothers’ request for removal of Lois Lowry’s prizewinning novel The Giver from all Mount Diablo Schools reading lists and libraries. Not so fast. Before we “burn” this book, readers should take these out-of-context conclusions, and place the pieces right back in context where they belong, inside the whole story. 
