Bottle Cap Rain
Havertown, PA
2015, Senior, Poetry & Spoken Word
The forecast called for rain today
I looked outside and waited today
The clouds grew dark and swelled today
Today the first few drops were bottle caps
Up to my toes
Stepping on colorful legos
Hangers, stakes, and other things that scrape
Rivers pour into my mouth agape
Up to my knees
Shopping bags in the breeze
Cups, knifes, and spoons
The storm carried on well past noon
Up to my shoulders
Coming down and cracking boulders
Remotes and computers, makes me wonder
A whale song rolls over like thunder
Up to my head
Realizing we were misled
Silhouettes of fins in the sky
How could have it gotten this high?
Head, shoulders, knee, and toes
The trash builds up and
Down we go
Reflection
The poem “Bottle Cap Rain” was inspired by the precipitation cycle. The cycle starts with water molecules evaporating from the ocean and ends as clean rain from the clouds when it actually precipitates. However if the cycle were to ever pick up something bigger, I figured there would be a lot of trash raining down on us. Which would be fitting considering how much litter is poured into the oceans each year. In this poem, I wanted to focus on the sheer extensiveness of plastic garbage. There are big, hulking objects of plastic, but there are also the small ways plastic is incorporated into many materials. There are literal cities of trash floating at the middle of five different gyres in this world. Quite simply if the ocean were to ever give our discarded things back to us, we would be buried alive.