Poem in Summer

Always, the summer sun that pours
its chemicals into the trees
and takes a shape in fruit we like;
all produce of the thoughtless bees,
the wind--nature's routine lusts;
are dumped on the indifferent ground.
The celery's green foundation rusts.

Winter, fall, are permanent.
But in the greenhouse of the mind
the world flowers, or burns, by
other seasons: man's laboring ways.
Unlike the bee stuck to its hod
man sees the atom in a cloud,
but still, lives in a ritual daze.

The violent rich who stalk the earth
absorb the sun and auction off
all the summer's golden stream,
leaving us to eat, rebuild and dream.
We dream of feasts, of happy towns,
the green, yet warring earth controlled;
and nothing bought and nothing sold.

The bee that builds, the breathing leaf,
each of nature's subtle robots
must diet, turn its wheels, and die;
but we could choose the way we live:
against all senseless death unite
the single life to common force
and make our days and nights become
great open warehouses of the sun.

- Bert Meyers, 1953, unpublished poems