"Once bears get hooked on garbage, there's no cure"

You who seek a root cause for America's presence in Iraq, read below. Gary Snyder saw it coming 42 years ago. You might care to look through his crystal ball, which even, by then, was singing an oil elegy for this country. The metaphor of America's power as a mud puddle oil slick spreading in beautiful iridescent colors which fade the larger the slick becomes said and still says it all.

Ah, that's America:
the flowery glistening oil blossom
spreading on water--
it was so tiny, nothing, now it keeps expanding
all those colors,
our world
opening inside outward toward us,
each part swelling and turning
who would have thought such turning;

as it covers,
the colors fade.
and the fantastic patterns
fade.
I see down again through clear water.

it is the same
ball bounce rhyme the
little girl was singing
all those years.

--Gary Snyder, from "The Back Country," Fulcrum PRess, london, 1967