Pals | M Sean Dowd | One Act Play
Act I Scene III
The Three Witches Portend What is to Come
Dedicated to “PALS,” the Preservation of Agricultural Lands Society originally established to save lands in the Niagara Fruit Belt and now growing in Southern China and Batam Island.
Witch 1 When shall we greet greed again?
When gardens gone they know the pain When hungers rue be our great gain When man as god’s a silly game
That’s played its course… Evolved!
HA HA HA HA HA
Witch 2 Where shall we grow fruits and grains? These wooded lands show too few gains Grow instead where water’s none
We’ll grow them Californians Hahahaha
Witch 3 How shall fertile lands be made
To bare but what we sow?
We’ll feed them poisons to all else Then greed well sewn we’ll reap
A harvest bounty more by far than known before to man A bounty goodly nature knows be seldom seen…
Perverse!
Ha Ha HA HA HA
Me Me Me Ha! Ha!Ha? Ha? Who goes there? Who speaks to me?
Of such great and good utility? Of power which I feel born to me.
Deserved, mine! Now all shall see That I alone do hold the key
to all of life’s great mysteries
So thanks to you my goodly three,
(Simple cost accountants, Chemical Companies & Land Developers) kind spirits serve me well
The dreams you’ve sent shall spur me on I’ll push with new found vigour
But wait! These supernatural solicitacions, these multinational corporations Cannot be true
Cannot be false
I’m in the brain drain corridor I’ve quaffed their fruity wines and yet, if true
Why do my usually nimble fingers curl and writhe in pain
and I suck at my thumb against the use of nature?
These rows of God sent, tasty fruit
are stripped
and malls now form the root
of all that’s evil in my garden home around Niagara
Once strong branched plants grew hearty stalks
Now stocks less friendly hunt these woods for weakened game
can spring new shoots in southern climes where deeper roots
hold plant succession fast
Yet visions have I still of plants that left to grow unpruned. Grew heavy, leaden, laden far beyond what they could hold. So laden with the heavy pull of fruit soon to be rotten that plants then dreamt of cold hard steel and wished for cuts less cruel.
A caring farmer knows to prune be kind and cut or chop
with steel that’s cold in dormant times it will protect your crop
The city folk cut less, they fear or laissez-faire, cut not.
Short cropped trees to them seem not fair before, they’ve seen them not!
They think them stunted. “Let them grow”
more fruit will then I have
More fruit and fewer trees I’ve need of for I’d rather see
a land use that I’ve greater need of “Come on, play the game!”
We’ll build a home Improve our gains
on land no longer needed
for the talents first God given to the Garden City
These paved fields spill out water now that’s poisoned so with alum.
they cause me loss of faculty
so at an age when wise folks rage
would shut you down in swift and hurried order
I see my usually nimble fingers curl and writhe in pain whilst I suck at my thumb, against the use of nature
Alzheimer’s and senility, when thoughts return to a simpler times
may hold the cure for my hometown in metaphor my rhyme
A choice based on the bottom line
does by extension cause
the loss of too much choice by far
Just cause, Accounting, Economic need Tell not how increased yields, net squalor Apparitions all
Your opportunity costs much more than interest in your dollar bears
Return the land
to proud new owners
Strip the malls, of right of place Clean up your act
Revive our Garden City
Photo by Phil Robson on Unsplash
Bio:
M Sean Dowd lives and writes in Spain near Vigo In Galicia. His family belongs to the Nation of Métis of Ontario in Canada.
Credits include from the 1990’s, Gitmo begone, in Serai Magazine of Montreal, poems in Polar Borealis and Polar Starlight (BC Canada) , CNF in Syncopation Literary journal of Toronto and an upcoming novella with Hear our Voice LLC in SC USA.
