The man who sold his lawn to standard oil

Joked with his neighbors come to watch the show

While the bulldozers, drunk with gasoline,

Tested the virtue of the soil

Under the branchy sky

By overthowing first the privet-row.

Forsythia-forays and hydrangea-raids

Were but preliminaries to a war

Against the great-grandfathers of the town,

So freshly lopped and maimed.

They struck and struck again,

And with each elm a century went down.

All day the hireling engines charged the trees,

Subverting them by hacking underground

In grub-dominions, where dark summer’s mole

Rampages through his halls,

Till a northern seizure shook

Those crowns, forcing the giants to their knees.

I saw the ghosts of children at their games

Racing beyond their childhood in the shade,

And while the green world turned its death-foxed

page

And a red wagon wheeled,

I watched them disappear

Into the suburbs of their grievous age.

Ripped from the craters much too big for hearts

The club-roots bared their amputated coils,

Raw gorgons matted blind, whose pocks and scars

Cried Moon! On a corner lot

One witness-moment, caught

In the rear-view mirrors of the passing cars.

POET NOTES

Stanley Kunitz became the tenth Poet Laureate of the United States in the autumn of 2000. Kunitz was ninety-five years old at the time, still actively publishing and promoting poetry to new generations of readers. In the New York Times Book Review, Robert Campbell noted that Kunitz's selection as poet laureate—the highest literary honor in America—"affirms his stature as perhaps the most distinguished living American poet." Atlantic Monthly contributor David Barber likewise cited Kunitz as "not only one of the most widely admired figures in contemporary poetry but also, rarer still, a true ambassador for his art." Barber felt that Kunitz, having "continued to write poems of a startling richness at an advanced age . . . has arguably saved his best for last. . . . The venerable doyen of American poetry is still a poet in his prime."