Lorine Niedecker, "Don't tell me property is sacred!"

published in New Directions in Prose & Poetry (the New Directions annual), volume 11 (1949), p. 302:


Don't tell me property is sacred!
Things that move--yes!--
cars out rolling through the country,
how they like to rest

on me--beer cans and cellophane
on my clean-mowed grounds.
Whereas I'm quiet . . . I was born
with poor eyes and a house.