I walk on the Earth with my feet bare
And my ears open
And my eyes closed
And I think to myself that I love her more than her inhabitants.
Except for some.
Those young at heart, with the love of Earth so few today find time for.
Those with flowers in their hair.
But the hippies are dying, I think.
It has been decades since Woodstock and Leary and Ralph Waldo Emerson.
It has been a lifetime since protests were truly peaceful.
It has been forever since the peace sign was political.
“The hippies are dying,” I whisper to the wind as she ripples a pond and musses my hair.
To Mother Earth under my toes.
And I open my eyes to look at the concrete and asphalt and skyscrapers
Erected like trophies that money won for conquering nature.
I see the oil spilt on ground,
Water,
Hurting the life around it like a poltergeist.
Because we dig it up and do not think why it was buried deep to begin with.
“The hippies are dying,” I choke out,
Cold despite the pierced ozone and slushy ice caps.
Goosebumps rise on my skin at the realization
That the land has been leveled and smoothed.
Humans can’t be bothered to adapt their steps to the land;
The land must be adapted to us.
Our shoes and our wheels and our buildings.
And we rape the land
And reap the profit
And call it “getting by”.
The Hippies are dying,” I sob, tears dammed up in my eyes.
I see the weeds push up through cement cracks and feel compassion for their struggle.
I weep for the death of a culture that has been reduced to a stereotype of Volkswagons
And The Beatles
And weed.
I weep for the forgotten harmony we humans strove to share with our world.
And the hippies are dying, dammit.
They are tired.
They have lived full,
And they are lying down
To be in holes in the ground
And we have not listened.
I wrote this upon the passing of one of my dear, influential college professors a while back.
Livid, Sanguine 