Giedre's Song

All the people here work in boxes
They watch their boxes when they get home
Then they sleep on top of box springs
In little box rooms
The little beep box screams to wake up
With its little black block numerals
Then take a shower in the wash box
And grab a box of cereal

It's off to work in the
Cracker box train subway in the tubes in the ground
Or behind the wheel of your boxcar
the lights blink off and on
Before your eyes
All these cubicles and classrooms
Desks and pens and squares of tree-skin
Work all day for another paper for your box:
Diploma or a bank account.

And meanwhile the trees stretch restless and chaotic
Sighing with season's change
The animals are singing all around
The squawks and tweets and cooing sounds
Your smooth curved frame and fretted brow
Will never fit
In this eight million box town

All our box brains
and matchbox cathedrals
Boxed dinners
Our 24-box days and 30-some box moons
Could never hold the sun, a mouse
or your heart
or the Spirit
The world a whirl of wind and leaves and lives
That has no box sense, nor sense of proper time
It nips and blows at our ankles and chests
With its quarky, atomic, explosive, pulsing relativity
River runs, life runs
in a deeper stream