The Evergreens Poem by Nancy Ames

'All night there was an ultra-white
moon and now this must be the
inevitable freezing dawn, orange
and bright but blue around the edges,
a waning sun rising above a sparkling
landscape overcome with an embroidery
of black flowers and dwindling death,
which only annoys the evergreens, ever
the philosophical trees, scorning the
riotous existence of lesser plants who
squander their legacies of light in
desperate displays of adulation beneath
that ruthless sky and then hysterically
scatter seeds upon an earth that is
already hard as steel.

This arctic air arrives with super-sonic
messages, trumpeting that all this false
gold and copper stuff, seeming to flutter
like paper money in their twiggy fingertips,
is merely a tribute being pain, in vain, to
those tall metallic idols who stand tall
somewhere knee-deep in mirroring ice
and never relent.

On TV just now, the police were yelling,
'Freeze! ' and firing their guns at him, but
the boy kept on running because he came
from a much hotter country and he didn't
know the meaning of the word until he was
dying among the evergreens.'