Two and a half poems, probably

Can you tell I've been watching The Drug Years on VH1 Classic?

1970

I gather
1970
was a wilted flower

I was a child of the sixties
nine then
skinny-lunged
pink-elbowed and
almost pure

believing in love
blind to war
barely aware of people
who gazed into magic smoke
to see what I could see
with child’s eyes

there were always flowers
and they always came back
and the wild ones would grow
anywhere
(probably even in guns)

later I learned
once you started planting them
that’s when they died on you
the trick of the right nurture
so hard to master
while in the driveway gravel
the violas sang