Poets United Midweek Motif ~ Plastic Bags

“ A whale just died after consuming more than 80 plastic bags. A whale!”
― Shenita Etwaroo 

"Beat Plastic Pollution!"

Today is UN World Environment Day: 5 June 2019.

I was born with a plastic spoon in my mouth. Pete Townshend
Read more at: https://www.brainyquote.com/topics/plastic

I was born with a plastic spoon in my mouth. Pete Townshend
Read more at: https://www.brainyquote.com/topics/plastic

Description of the Fundamental Cause of Plastic Pollution.

Image Courtesy of UPSTREAM

“I'm not out there suggesting that we should ban every plastic product. But there are some whose environmental costs exceed their utility, and the [plastic] bag is one of them.”
― Susan Freinkel, Plastic: A Toxic Love Story

 “So many things seemed to come in plastic bags now that it was difficult to keep track of them. The main thing was not to throw it away carelessly, better still to put it away in a safe place, because there was a note printed on it which read 'To avoid danger of suffocation keep this wrapper away from babies and children'."
― Barbara Pym, Quartet in Autumn

 

Midweek Motif ~ Plastic Bags

So.  I still use plastic bags quite often, mostly for food and for keeping books dry next to my water bottle.  My friends use plastic bags to pick up what their dogs leave outside.  What would life be like without plastic bags? I saw one dance in the film "American Beauty," I imagined them as separate beings in "Flights" by Olga Tokarczuk: 

     “Now I see them from the window of the bus, these airborne anemones, whole packs of them, roaming the desert. Individual specimens cling on tight to brittle little desert plants, fluttering noisily--perhaps this is the way they communicate. . . ."
   

Your Challenge:  Consider the immanent death of the plastic bag and imagine it into a new poem.  Maybe you are writing an ELEGY, maybe an ODE.

I was born with a plastic spoon in my mouth. Pete Townshend
Read more at: https://www.brainyquote.com/topics/plastic

Sermon to the Trash

By Richard Schiffman

Everything passes, said the Buddha,
and I saw it myself on the river– 

tennis balls and condoms,
waterlogs and dead dogs,
styrofoam battleships,
the mastless schooner of a rubber sandal,
subaqueous plastic bags
rippling their ghoulish curtains,
a belly down, drowned waterfowl
legs splayed, plucked clean by the waves.
But what the Buddha didn’t say
is that everything returns
a few hours later, when the current flips direction,
shuttling eternally in the limbo of the tides.
. . . .

(Read the rest HERE.)

Fifteen Million Plastic Bags

Adrian Mitchell

I was walking in a government warehouse
Where the daylight never goes.
I saw fifteen million plastic bags
Hanging in a thousand rows.

Five million bags were six feet long
Five million bags were five foot five
Five million were stamped with Mickey Mouse
And they came in a smaller size.

Were they for guns or uniforms
Or a kinky kind of party game?
. . . .
(Read the rest HERE.)

Beneath Carnival Lights

 

Ben Kingsley

You can’t stop morning
from melting plastic bags.

100 other goldfish twisty-tied
up and dreading a hot sunrise.

You’re in mourning together
for the old 20+ gallon tank.

For the familiarity of the green leaf
that released you from an orange egg sack.

How’d you find yourself
in one of these again?

. . . . 

(Read the rest HERE.)

 

Gracious Bag by GorillaSushi at Wiki Commons

 Please share your new poem using Mr. Linky below and visit others in the spirit of the community— (Next week Sumana’s Midweek Motif will be ~ Bridge. )