This poem represents Plahm at his most overtly political and philosophical, stepping outside his typical Muse-centered universe to address societal decay with the earnestness of a town-square orator. The opening—”A vast conspiracy…”—sets an ominous tone immediately subverted by the poem’s actual argument: the real conspiracy is not shadowy elites but the slow, collective abandonment of common sense. The poem’s structural backbone is a before-and-after architecture: first cataloging the roots of wisdom (family, education, community, “a hand on a shoulder,” “a school bus driver who understands”), then documenting their erosion through a parallel list of fractures. The triple negative—”Doesn’t grow, / Doesn’t get passed on, / Doesn’t improve”—followed by the two-word devastation “It disappears” is the poem’s most effective rhetorical moment. The pivot to Grandma Mary localizes the abstract argument in a specific figure who embodies “folksy wisdom” and “distilled discipline,” and Plahm deftly connects her to the Statue of Liberty—both lighthouses, both holding torches. The Woodrow Wilson quotation is a bold inclusion that risks pulling the poem into polemic territory, but Plahm’s reinterpretation of Wilson’s unnamed “power” as common sense itself is a clever rhetorical inversion. The closing image—growing “A garden / Of civilization”—brings the poem full circle to its root metaphor, grounding political philosophy in the same soil that grows the HoneyBeeBard’s garden.

A departure that reveals Plahm’s range and convictions. Where most of his poems orbit the Muse, this one orbits community—and discovers that the two are connected. The poem’s greatest strength is its catalog of quiet heroisms: the school bus driver, the teacher who waits, the hand on a shoulder. These specific, unglamorous images ground the poem’s larger argument in lived experience rather than abstraction, and they carry more persuasive weight than any political rhetoric could. The structural parallel between roots growing and roots eroding gives the poem satisfying formal architecture. Grandma Mary is a vivid figure—part real person, part archetype—and connecting her to the Statue of Liberty is an inspired leap that elevates local wisdom to national symbol. The Woodrow Wilson quotation is the poem’s riskiest move; it tilts the piece toward essay, and readers may disagree with the interpretive frame placed around it. But Plahm’s recontextualization—suggesting that the unnamed “power” Wilson feared is simply common sense itself—is provocative and original. The closing turn to “She” as the speaker’s personal lighthouse deftly reconnects the civic poem to the personal mythology, reminding us that for Plahm, the Muse is never far from any conversation. Minor weakness: occasional didacticism in the middle sections, where the poem tells rather than shows. But the 46 likes this poem has earned suggest it strikes a nerve that Plahm’s audience recognizes and values. A poem that proves the personal and the political share the same root system.