Tiny Flowers

    Along the alley’s chain-link fence,
sun glints off paper, plastic, aluminum.
    Around them, tiny flowers grow.
        The alleyway will hum
    with bees and beetles that will sense
these mats of chickweed neighboring the slum.

    Just up the hill a little ways,
mansions float like mountains in the sky.
    They nearly touch the sun, whose glow
        engulfs them. Every eye
    can see them casting back the rays
of sunlight for the praise of passersby.

    Their sweeping lawns are lush and green
as if a brush had colored every stalk.
    Once a week a crew will mow
        each yard, so the whole block
    is trim, homogenous, and clean,
unsuited for a robin, finch, or hawk.

    I saw a yard, though, wholly blue
and purple, like a lonely patch of light,
    as if each flake of last month’s snow
        that disappeared from sight
    had been reborn as something new —
a violet, which in this zone’s like a blight.

    Those weeds, which sprouted on their own,
don’t carpet the great lawn just to entrance
    one human being, nor can they know
        that eyes have seen the dance
    and shimmer of each tint and tone
leaping and blending through the sward’s expanse.

    There is a place far, far from here
that would make this community seem dark:
    two faces of a broad plateau
        where you can hear the lark,
    observe it as it hovers near
the clouds; a land both riotous and stark;

    a land where saw-wort, spring cinquefoil,
herb Robert, mouse-ear hawkweed, tormentil,
    huge ferns, and tiny flowers grow
        as wild on dale or hill,  
    on limestone, gritstone, scree, or soil
as anywhere men have kept their meddling still.