happy birthday

It is easy to look at you
and see the blackened edges--the
dubious growth of power,
quick and fast with dirty hands
and miss the fields.
Clouds that hang so low and full
they embrace the corn,
vast expanse of growing green
an open book from horizon to horizon where
the dreams of your soil and scent take root,
where the painters sigh
and novelists match expanse of white
to open road.

It is easy to point fingers, and turn heads
to secrets and un-truths and thoughtless wars,
and thoughtful bombs, and hulking cars
and miss the frankness--the openness
of your broad white porches, to view the headlines
with disgust and twisting faces and miss
our children running in the yard with ragged cries,
the fireflies, the broad-faced way
we stride into the wind and feel it is our right.

Easy, to hate with the eyes of others
and rail that you deserve your "trials,"
because you huddle in your bed childlike
lashing with rocks in fists when someone pinches
easy, to hate your cluttered cities, your low hanging smog,
clear-cut trees, weapons, your
paranoia and

miss the way we all still huddle together in the night
knowing all the words to your songs,
and watch the wide sky burst open with color--
tingling somewhere with the knowledge that
we are the brave.  We are the free.