It is true that our grass
Is greener than yours.
Believe what you want.
Hell is the absence of weather.

Across the neighborhoods,
The overwatered, modest
Squares of lawn have learned
To preen temselves.

Their automatic sprinklers
Glint darkly like beaks
In the afternoon sun.
On one of them, a young girl

Plays with a doll and a needle.
She’s wrenched its leg off.
And as the scrub jays in the locusts
Rasp approving cries,

She tears the hem
From her long, black dress
To sew it the clothes
Of a cripple.