L'aura del Campo

Progress

Progress

Camas lily makes way for green lawns and the wasteland of asphalt.
Sage and yellowbells join balsamroot in sorrow,
refugees where old rails abandoned them as they passed on by,
while their cousins were plowed under, paved over, weeded, poisoned.

Prairie recedes to mountain slopes where knapweed and sedum crowd them out
and the fire that would restore their rightful place becomes a naughty word (slanderous and vulgar).
Still, in one corner abandoned by the elite, hidden from unseeing eyes,
one camas lily blooms.

© Kåre Enga [170b.9] 6 October 2013.

Note: the prompt was "progress". In this landscape "what that is" is debatable.