I found this Bill Holm (1943-2009) poem when I was browsing at the magical Poets House in New York last summer and am just as arrested by it this afternoon as I was months ago…
“Spring Again”
Why this anger at grass or pigweed
or aphids killing honeysuckle?
This is just what happens in the world.
It’s us who fertilize our own
miseries and love them.
We are a human patch of dandelions,
each yellow flower mumbling:
one more war, one more of those
presidents and then we’ll stop.
Every drink is the drunk’s last one,
then the next one, and the next one,
and we all know it, whatever
public lies we tell each other
while bending our heads to the hoe.
live in the layers 