Amends Summary

"Amends" begins with an image of an apple bough at night, studded either with stars, or flowers that look like stars. This gives way to a long list of everything else the moonlight touches, from the small stones by the tree to the seashore. From the seashore the light moves inland, touching a railroad before reaching an industrial agricultural field where a "crop-dusting plane," or a plane used to spray fertilizer and pesticides, rests for the night. Finally, the moonlight reaches the trailers where the workers sleep, and gently touches their eyelids "as if to make amends." For what, the speaker does not specify, but we suspect it is for the violence of poverty, and all the damage industrial agriculture has done to the land.