Our Oceans, Our Plastic
Chicago, IL
2015, Junior, Poetry & Spoken Word
Past
The ocean used to be a place where you’d go with your family and have a picnic
You’d drive to the water in your newly invented car unaware of the gas that was coming out
The plastic you left in the sand is still there
Your empty Coca Cola glass bottles
Your peanut butter and jelly sandwich baggies
Unable to disintegrate
They slowly drifted to the water
Poisoning the birds, marine life, and coral reefs
You think that nothing can destroy the oceans
But you’re wrong
Because very soon they will have loads of plastic in them
Water bottles, glass bottles, plastic wrap
It’s not your fault though
Because you didn’t know
Present
Plastic
We use it every day
We keep our sandwiches in it
Our fleeces have it
The beads from our soap
It’s what our water bottles are made out of
The ocean is very familiar with plastic
Because it infects the water
The birds eat it
The fish swim in it
The ocean carries it from coast to coast
Stopping at certain places
It’s there for 10, 100, 1,000 years
We know what plastic is doing
It’s killing marine life
Seals, sharks, and sea horses
That are swallowing this plastic
The piles of garbage polluting the water
Future
Pollution took over the world
People tried to stop it
The government banned things like soap, plastic, etc.
Nothing worked
The problem couldn’t be fixed
The marine animals died
The trees died
People wore oxygen masks because they couldn’t breath
People were dying daily
No one went swimming
People could barley walk around because of all the garbage
Everywhere
Reflection
I choose the type of writing I did because I really liked the idea of doing poems that all connect in a certain way. I did a past, present, and future poems that all had the same main idea, but changed depending on the time period. In English class, we watched videos on pollution in the ocean and others bodies of water and how things like plastic are really affecting our oceans. We also researched some facts on pollution and the amount of pollution that goes into the water each year. My poems signify how much pollution has changed throughout time (peoples views on it) and how polluting our oceans will continue to get worse unless we do something to stop it. I think that the past, present, future idea is very unique because it shows a cause and effect pattern as well as how the world has changed when it comes to the idea of our bodies of water and our garbage that's infecting it. My poem is special to me because I feel like it passionately shows the difference between peoples mindsets and the fact that even though we know what is happening to our oceans, a lot of people are doing nothing to stop it and it effect you in the future.