Inner City Tree Poem by Tom Hamilton

Trash landing bumble bees search the girders for flowers.

Ride the subway for hours, searching for vines to climb.
Parking meters lose time, as the pawn shop door chimes.

Her underpinning's tied around the sewage pipes.
The dud buds aren't ripe, the concrete never grows.
And the leaves turn metallic, as silver as snow.

Deals which go down under her shade are shady.
A rubber degradation of tight tourniquets and friction.
Until the prideful mind is fiction and the angst wades lazy.
A gray polluted haze makes the streets seem wavy.

When she was a fern we were a purer society.
But now the toxic garbage surges through our branches.
The tortured light dances when the railroad bridge screams.
And the foundry bricks fall, like hard spoiled fruit.
While the stinking, septic rain soaks into her roots.

Ignore the rummy scarecrow, of a bum at her base.
Like a black eyeless face welded into her trunk
Kicked from his bunk by the strongest of the weakest.
Smelling of apple cider and writhing in feces.
Pulling off pieces of his arms like they're bark.
All the peaceful green garden behind the alarms.

Mother Nature infects with no outside effects.
The brown insects ravage the body from the inside.
Constructing their leisure while their landlord dies.
Ultimately tracks are visible, vivisecting white paper.
The song of the swallow, swallowed up by the bus horn.
All chicks which are born sample that lethal sap.
And no life may flourish wrapped up in those traps.