Weeding Your Organic Garden Plots

Can you describe to us your field
Of acquisition, your manners
Of acquiring and hanging on

To areas of resources
You can, personally, exploit,
The better to go on living?

You are not an innocent
Reading, writing, viewing, hearing,
Touching your thoughts to this question,

But try to shake the conviction,
So painfully, wonderfully
Human, that your alternative

Is guilt. Guilt and innocence form
Not only an opposition
For social elaborations

But also a technology
In the fields of acquisition.
You could build a small library

Of classics, eastern and western,
That bemoan, somewhere within them,
The contrast between the human

Agon of guilt and innocence
And the simple hungers of lives
Of lilies of the field, tigers,

Birds chorusing in careless woods,
Any life other than human.
But guilt and innocence

Are territorial songs sung
By you, yourself, the likes of you,
In your fields of acquisition.