Sun and Ice

In flood of ice, immortal winters sing their songs
Across the prairies, perishing in storms of ice.
And then the silence.
The vacant, frigid silence
As soundless as frozen frogs.

Nothing stirs, no shivering mice,
The chirping gophers chilled to icy cell,
Gay grasshoppers dead as old twigs.
No bug or lice or snake, all stunned,
All stricken
In earth's refrigerated hell.

The land, too cold to shudder.
The windmills muted in
The frozen grease of wheel
And rudder, too cold to spin,
The blades too stiff to cry,
Too cold to sing,
The frozen sky, too cold too breathe
The birds of wing too cold to fly.

And I, stiff as dead tulips,
Stood in that hypothermic land
Stood numb as dead trees
Fried dry in bitter freeze.

Then the shrouded sun
Came prowling through tall gloom
Like old men whispering at the tomb,
And laughed its cold and bloodless laugh.
And I? I stood too deep-frozen
In that endless empty room
To see, or half suppose
That April's Alpine Buttercups
Could once again spring free.

To the Killers

You cannot kill the earth,
You killers.
You cannot kill the trees
You obdurate fools,
You mindless bundles of cells,
You who are blind
Your eyes locked to the bottom line,
You who have not walked one step
Through the parched tears,
Your fat asses
Welded to your board room chairs.
You scorch the forests,
Saw their legs from them,
Sell their splintered corpses
You impotent yowlers,
You, who cannot create a worm.
But when you have finished singing
The songs of idiots
And ghouls
And lie down to die
The forest will digest you
With love.