American Labor Day

Trees are screeching alive with birds at september’s dawn. We don’t know
Whether they are visiting or coming or going.
Snow will fall in the mountains, possibly. It’s strange
Georgie Girl died this year; Boy George finally out of prison. We sigh
To each other in text msgs, absent offspring grown now in a world so small
We touch each other w/ a single syllable. our children all seem
To be living in china, spain or brazil,
bemoaning the fates of fatted calves strengthened w/ carcinogenic hormones
& chickens raised in concentration camps, infants hosting & harboring tiny
microbes as yet unnamed,
& the challenges of losing weight on diets loaded with unseen killer carbohydrates.
From our foamy chaises on padded derrieres,
We still want to weep with maudlin self pity
over hard times we recall when someone from our neighborhood
Was killed in Vietnam over half a century ago
Tho between us, we can’t seem to remember his name now
in these groups where we each purchase our own perfectly brewed coffee, we
still manage to purge a puked up poem from our own ancient recollections. Back home, we turn on gas fireplaces for the first time this season, feel a newly
arthritic wrist, cry discreetly
over the stock market & conspiratorial candidacies.
We wonder if our banks hold water, or gold.
Hair replacement products are sold during tv network news, accompanying
sex enhancing chemicals, cholesterol controllers, a supplement guaranteed
to grow yr own eyelashes, some new abatement for
excessive pressure of the blood.
Every moment a miracle or two is stalking us on the internet.
Still, we sigh over electronic & environmental progress, & bitterly denounce
fortunes made & squandered by people a fraction of our age who drive foreign cars off their own hillside cliffs, taking wife & children with them, a perfect hole in one. Outside, under the hum of electric wires burdened with a trillion satellite signals carrying cacaphonous messages, earthquakes, floods, fires & rumors of war
Trees are screeching with birds
on overloaded wires that hum a loud blues dirge to a nonexistent & unhearing audience
Unmonitored by you tube or the 60 minute news
Even at the birth of September, a most glorious Labor day.