Baby's Breath Poem by gershon hepner

With pesticides we now grow roses,
and we poison baby’s breath,
and fresh fragrances fill noses
with environmental death.
Fungicides must rid each flower
of the insects farmers dread;
what the chemicals devour
is the life that we once led
when fresh flowers used to lift
poets’ spirits. Daffodils,
for example, make a gift
whose stench recalls Satanic mills,
with pollution of far places
where the flowers grow en masse,
poisons bringing homeostasis
for death’s glory, gross, no grass.
Baby’s breath in bouquets bring
risks of poisoning the breath
of young babies and the sting
of inevitable death.

5/14/06