Noise

Noise creates weariness in the soul,
touching everywhere.
Trucks and school buses
getting longer
and heavier and louder,
make still more noise,
not just on by-passes and highways,
but here
on the streets where we live.

It is just plain wrong.

No silence for contemplation.
nowhere to think,
to sit and enjoy the quiet
when days are long,
and songs of birds and insects
fill air with song:
the sensual equivalent
of light;

absent human bustle…
just birds
and the sound of bees
wrestling colorful flowers
for their pollen;
or perhaps, a shower
gently appears
to soften summer’s sodden heat.

Human noise is malevolently different
and daily grows:
hedge trimmers, leaf blowers, mowers
make the eardrums ache,
daily dullen our hearing…
even music blasting in cars
you can hear
even in winter
with windows rolled up.

Such noise is clearly unhealthy
and predicts our fate:
Given rules of animal mutation,
humans will,
eventually, be born deaf;
and, given time,
This Earth, where humans uniquely live,
will not exist
because humans, when they still had ears,
chose not to listen.