Green Green Grass

In one of the classrooms I am observing for my teaching degree, the students are working on a poetry unit. As a fun activity to involve the college students observing, the English teacher involved us in a project where everyone in the class write a poem topic on a slip of paper, and the papers are drawn out of a hat. Whatever topic you draw, you must write a poem incorporating that theme. My topic is "Green Green Grass." Since I'm incapable of writing almost anything that isn't a dark perversion of theme, I of course wrote about... well. You'll see.

Green Green Grass

In England black is the color of mourning;
In Japan, they weep in white.
Standing in this green green grass
I know Montana's crepe is green.

In Appalachia there's an old wives' tale:
"Grass won't grow where blood was spilled."
They can not see this meadow
From the Appalachian Mountains.

A meadowlark is perched atop a
Green green stalk of prairie grass.
Beneath its cheerful song: the earth
Where the last of the bison fell.

A pronghorn nibbles tender shoots
Of green green grass and sage that
Was nourished by the devastation
Of smallbox, conflict, hunger.

The Little Bighorn Battlefield
Is halcyon, verdant, beautiful.
But here the peaceful rolling prairie
Is the color of pain and sorrow.

The rustling grass is whispering
A tale of cruelty and hate.
It parts revealing solemn stones
That reveal man's darkest deeds.

"Here lies a Cheyenne brave
who fell defending his people."
"Here lies a U.S. soldier
Who fell fulfilling his duty."

Yet I see a little Crow girl
With laughter like a birdsong
Playing in the green green grass
With a little white tourist boy.

And I think that green might also be
The color of hope.

I'll Love You Until The End of Tonight

___When people lost their virginity on television, it was never like this.
___The room was darkened beyond what could be called "intimate;" it did not seem a setting to reveal one's self, but rather to hide. He could smell stale incense covering stale marijuana, old laundry, a musty wan of a place not cleaned often enough nor with sufficient scrutiny. Her bed was a messy tangle of wrinkled sheets and worn comforters, too low to the ground and creaky when she settled down on its lumpy mattress. He could tell from the way she moved to the bed that she was attempting to be seductive, but there was a lazy impassivity to her sashay, like she'd done it enough times to be apathetic.
___Before today, he had never seen a woman nude in person. She did not have the picture-perfect airbrushed body like the models in the magazines; her thighs were pale and striped with stretchmarks, her belly doughy with a dark birth mark by her hip. Her breasts lacked that surgical roundness and perk; they sagged softly, one nipple erect from the cold and the other sluggish to react. It wasn't that she was ugly - merely average, merely real.
___He was nervous when he pulled off his shirt, unbuttoned his pants; the TV virgins were always so suave and sure of themselves. He still had his wool socks on, itchy and smelling like sweat, and his erection pulled awkwardly against the fabric of his boxers. When he knelt down on the matress beside her, he wasn't sure how to start, awkwardly groping at her unfamiliar breasts while she tongued his mouth indifferently. Her fingertips were cold against his shaft as she laid back and he awkwardly positioned himself over her.
___She spread her legs like some sick caricature of those cute Hallmark cartoons with amorous arms opened wide: I love you THIS much! And when he ground his hips to hers, it was the same shallow promise he'd fulfill again and again for the rest of his life: I'll love you until the end of time tonight.