The Vacant Lot
The vapors of a morning mist rise from the vacant lot.
It is a tract forgotten— our neighborhood’s biggest blot.
Each person’s in denial as to their distribution
of building rubble and garbage that’s their daily contribution
to this precarious tumble of rubble, junk and weeds
that every year grows higher and in whose jumble breeds
mosquitoes, rats and killer bees that invade my yard
making neighborly coexistence exceptionally hard.
Good fences make good neighbors I’ve found to be a myth.
To see the truth of this old adage, we must strip it to its pith.
For the stone wall that borders it, alas, has been infested
by a million angry worker bees whose well-being’s invested
in invading all their neighbors, driving dogs and human folks
back into their houses to avoid their neighbors’ pokes.
A precarious situation, at best, dear reader, for,
there is a dilemma present at its core.
If we want to eat their honey must we put up with their stings?
Must we coincide with every danger nature brings?
For the ending of the story, if you care, you now must wait.
For I will recite it at a later date.
Today’s prompt words are vapor, precarious, myth, tract, denial and vacant lot.
A great poem, Judy! I love this line…
If we want to eat their honey must we put up with their stings?
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I may use this line as a spin-off for a poem later this week!
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But didn’t you buy it and in your Plotinus Ethic of Beauty turn it into a beautiful garden~? Now that we have read a great poem about the bad part, when will we get one with pictures about the transformation~??
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I have already done this. I’ll send you links later but my writer’s group is about to arrive…so you’ll have to curb your curiosity for a few hours.
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