Sometimes, I am grateful,

they have forgotten the farms,

the country, the people who farm

and plow and work for themselves,

and so hard.

If they had not forgotten them – us – then perhaps

we would be New Jersey also, malls and roads and

yellow air, the natural world buried in cement, hidden behind bridges,

inefficient and unprofitable.

Sometimes I am grateful that they have forgotten

the old barns and farms, that the economists and politicians

have found them inefficient and not global enough in the new economy.

Sometime I am grateful for that,

or they would be gone.