Unbrowning

Those hills weren't so beautiful.
They know the truth.

Just tall tan grasses making waves with the wind,
sprawling over the round stepped foothills.
The land was too barren, too dead, too far.
Too unsculpted--these promised land hills.

Spring rains once made them green--shining green
like holly leaves--and in groups the cattle grazed.
But this is not farmland.
This is no orchard.

One-hundred feet from freeway,
stifling, choking emptiness--
Think of the need! Imagine the people, the roads,
the homes: so artfully built!

Perfect square monuments made with concrete and tar,
unsplintering faux-wood and petroleum-carpetry.
Now we have porchside overlooks, views of
the vast expanses of other porches.

Row upon row of dual garages,
eighth-acre backyards and two-inch lawns;
lined up with their patterned paint and streetlight aisles,
cul-de-sacs stained near the curb with drips of oil.

The crown of the city, they call it.
Because you breach the top of the highway, and
you see them: the homes--jewels in a crown--
alive and aparkling and further than those hills once were.

They are colorful;
they are not so brown;
they will never turn green.
The cows are gone.

This is beauty among the hills.
They know the truth.