These are the Falling Years

Native hemlock, native rhododendron, native silence.

Briefcases of cash had been seen in the capital

and we were warned to trust no one elected.

And so it has come to pass, laws to protect

the world's richest industry, bowing to Plutus,

fees and royalties and paychecks the treacle of majorities.


Bulldoze the surface, there's profit lying deep,

pump your cased toxins through the sweet water,

strike the rich night with the drone of compressors,

drive quiet from the valleys and quickly, quickly,

take from the earth what belongs to no one,

waving your claims in the thickening air.


Welcome then, the immense vulgarities

of misapplied science, you in the immense cities,

incapable of free survival, insulated from the strong earth.

There is no escape, the circle is closed, and the net

is being hauled in. These things are Progress.


Here it is snowing just now, easy and windless,

native snow on native trees in native silence,

and the fields and the hills have been glitter-bombed.

– On the occasion of the passage of the Marcellus shale bill by the Pennsylvania legislature.
TItle and third stanza composed of lines by Robinson Jeffers.