The Most Endangered Species
Irvine, CA
2023, Senior, Poetry & Spoken Word
Climate Hero: Enzo Suma, Archaeoplastica
In Puglia, where white cliffs like icebergs sing by the cerulean sea
He strolled beneath the melting marble sun
As was his wont, he plucked each washed up bottle
the sea had belched up in a winter storm
Unbeknownst to him
He was curating a museum of trash
For the bottles were from his grandparents’ time
They made the townspeople realize
That plastic is like a boomerang
It always returns
Whether it’s a woman gazing at her pregnancy test strip
It’s negative once again
For the microplastic in her veins
has created a traffic jam in her endocrine system
Or, it’s the asthmatic child on the playground
Whose lungs crush his air out like a trash compactor
As the microplastics in the air
Fall like toxic snow
On our children
It’s even seeped into the belly of the Earth
And in her indigestion
She belches them out as blue plastic rock through her volcanoes
As fishing nets mixed with molten stone
Become part of the geology of the Earth
And so Enzo Suma, the beach stroller, a curator of trash
Showed us through Archaeoplastica, his museum of polymers
that plastic is forever
For when you see a bottle of Ajax from your grandparents’ time
You realize plastic never dies
But humans do
So the question is
Why do we choose to cause our own extinction?
Reflection
Reflection
It is artists who are our canaries in the coal mine - the songbirds who warn mankind when we go astray. This is how art is a ribbon around a bomb of truth. Every day, we are blasted with catastrophic news, and every day, we ignore it. However, art is the one thing that lures us to care about things that matter - by beckoning us into beauty. As an artist, I’m always attracted to any creative solution. The fact that Enzo, even though he is just a regular person, came up with a way to make people care about climate change by curating a museum of found plastic sparked my artist’s heart. What struck me about his museum is that even though my ancestors are gone, their trash lives on. Through my poem, I wanted to show others that anything can be art, even if it is quite literally trash. It is all about the story you tell with it. And that is the art of it - that art turns trash into treasure. It is my hope that even the simplest art such as the pieces in Enzo’s Archaeoplastica will strip the blindfolds from our eyes.