I saw her crying in Tom Planter’s field,
The blonde-haired girl in black nobody knows,
Her eyes were hollowed out, her raw lips peeled,
She wore a silver bullring through her nose.
She bore the scars of herbicidal birth,
The effluent she drank from river sewers,
The fertilisers ploughed in her moist earth,
The weed-killers and steroid-laced manures.
She showered herself in fairy liquid froth,
Her neck was hung with fishing leads on line,
She ate our waste, drank disinfectant broth,
And breathed our soot and diesel fumes so fine.
Let’s hold a wake and pray for Mother Earth,
Her hair of acid rain forest, etched black,
Her eyes, green, petrol jelly lakes,
The extinct broods, her children, won’t come back,
The angel turns and life begins anew,
She bows her head and leads me to a place,
A kissing gate through which the chosen few,
Will pass while we all rot in our disgrace.
I work in waste management, and I see the effects of the rot every day. We have to monitor the situation as it creates dangerous gases and toxic leachate which can contaminate the water supply. Your poem brought to mind some of the things I see and think about when I’m in the field. Our goal is to compact & contain the garbage and keep it localized…that is, away from the creeks, rivers, lakes, and ultimately the ocean. We’re doing what we can within our region, but I shudder to think about the looming problem nationwide and around the world, particularly in places where there isn’t as much oversight as there is where I work.
There are plastic bags in the Marianas Trench. The Pacific harbors a giant patch of trash that is practically an island that you can walk across. It’s gettin’ bad out there. I see her crying everywhere. We’ve even got our crappy tech junk floating around in space!
Not good for us personally, but it’s like George Carlin says, “this planet will shake us like a bad case of fleas”.
I like your rhyme scheme and the whole dystopian vibe. Welcome back.
Thank you so much Benjamin for all you’re doing to help protect the environment – your kind words make coming back feel so sweet, too! Harriet-Jacqui xx
Haunting imagery, Harriet-Jacqui. They once showed images from somewhere in Africa, MOUNTAINS of stinking rubbish the French dumped there. And each year those mountains grow bigger. It’s awful people there have to live like that, with no possibility of somehow reducing that pile, as there are no waste burning factories in that place.
Beautiful poem.
Al
Thank you so much, Al, trying to shake the world, especially Donald, out of his madness seems incredibly out of our reach, but we must never cease trying. HJ