Premature Harvest
The long grass that waved so bravely
Head high and haughty in the lush meadow
Shining its green gold in the June sun
Has been trampled and laid
Flat by writhing bodies
And careless feet,
No longer waiting erect for the blade of the reaper
So that fodder for cattle may result,
But mangled and muddied
As the plains of Vietnam
Under the heel of war.
Children and cattle
Grow thin in the famine;
They hunger and starve,
Die with pop bellies and eyes set astare,
Beaten to earth by a callous indifferent foe.
Now sparrows in hundreds feast and are filled
With the heads of the downtrodden grass;
As vultures and carrion crows gorge and grow fat
On the dead in the war-blasted fields.
And the sea-swamped deltas of rice.