Faulknerian Specimens

A Wordle prompt from Read Write Poem: leaking, hardscrabble, lunacy, veins, specimens, backward, nascent, impossible, wicked, cadence, crystalline, piggybanks

Streams bubble with toxins leached from mining tips
where there are no fish. The waterscape struggles to recover,
settling in ponds impounded by savage hairless beavers
who roam the banks kicking over leghold traps.

Crystalline lunacy leaks from the veins of Faulknerian specimens,
hardscrabble farmers trapped in impossible circumstances
in backward counties where the wicked cadences
of shaken empty piggybanks spell nascent starvation.

Chestnut forests used to flow over the piedmont but they are gone
blighted and blown like coal dust by harsh winds and swallowed
by the uncaring sea. Disintegrated ecosystem.

Still caught in webs of corporate denial, cover-up and spin,
lives farmed and mined on the steep slopes and deep hollows
of landscapes breeding new harsh resistance.

Collection available! Knocking from Inside