An Evening’s Festivities
Lafayette, CO
2022, Junior, Poetry & Spoken Word
A tanning bed.
White fur atop
With a foil reflector
To catch the bright sun perfectly.
Sunglasses positioned on a long snout,
But no umbrella in sight.
Elsewhere,
A factory keeps doing its job.
Pumping CO2 emissions,
Trapping heat.
The ice it sits above
Barely wider than itself
And alone in the bright, wide sea.
The polar bear’s tan.
A barstool.
A wild dog sits,
A drink in paw.
The melancholy expression
But pure hunger and sadness fall underneath.
Elsewhere,
Fields are replaced
With large machines.
Melancholy as always,
The coyote’s sip.
A necklace.
Like pearls, but not quite.
Fish adorned with plastic
Choking its owner.
Elsewhere,
People are oblivious
To waste, to plastic, to deaths.
White and unnatural
Cutting into skin
The fish’s necklace.
Reflection
Reflection
The idea of writing about climate change with humor was new to me, and when I began researching about it, I realized how bad it really was. When I started working on this piece, the image that first came to mind was a polar bear tanning on a singular piece of ice barely bigger than itself. That image was where this poem came from. And that image is what will keep me pushing to do better things in my community.