The Landfill for Life
Minnetonka, MN
2017, Junior, Poetry & Spoken Word
The landfill for life
where absent souls dump their desolate and destroyed
hopes and
dreams
into the abyss, swirling in a black, glistening whirlpool.
Imagine the coral
Stationary in the blue seas. Never moving,
Choking in a cloud of abandoned dreams and rejected aspirations.
Slowly roasting in a heat wave of ignorance.
Never wanting to move until it was too late.
Imagine the human species
Working constantly
Churning out carbon dioxide
Dumping lost ambitions into the sea
Watching through an acrylic window as the world slowly sank
Always saying they’ll do something until it was too late.
New laws and bills are proposed,
Governors frantically trying to fix the world with a single bandage
But as the letters and paragraphs are being read and sent up for review,
Tons of trash burden the sea.
No matter how hard we wait, letters and signatures won’t
Clean the debris up.
It’s a blame game,
Citizens blaming oil barons,
Barons blaming everybody but themselves.
Pointing fingers endlessly,
a hall of mirrors, deflecting a laser beam of responsibility.
somewhere in the rift of trash,
Swirling endlessly in the sea,
Humanity explodes, gushing out heaps of onyx oil
Blanketing the sea and drowning the water’s plea for help
The thrashing waves calming as gallons burst and ooze out
The hands of the ocean still as they drop
And suffocate on the thick blackness.
Reflection
Reflection
I wanted to show through my poem that if we don’t stop ocean pollution, marine animals wouldn’t be the only ones suffering. I made sure to write that blaming others would do nothing to help our cause. We have to realize that no matter what, it’s at the hand of the consumer that decides whether or not we have a real chance at beating this problem. It’s all our own faults for various reasons and we have to realize why and stop. I tried to set the tone to be very somber and melancholy because the majority of the poem is the effects of ocean pollution. This poem is trying to reach to the reader, telling them what pollution is doing to it. Others create posters and host events to raise awareness, but me, I’m just sitting here with a keyboard at my hands creating words that will hopefully show you, and everyone, the horrors, and reality of ocean pollution.