How often I think of you, each and every day I ask what my actions have done and could do to harm you, how to choose, what to use for the food we want to grow, to keep, to cook,
what to throw away and how and where to put each kind and weight of paper, cardboard, plastic. What car will we buy now or next, what trips will we take this summer, next year how can we take care of you and ourselves too.
I worry about you when I open my top kitchen drawer to pull out a plastic bag its box designed to make its use trouble-free for preserving the snacks, the sandwiches, for my children’s lunch and our summer sails on your blue waters. It’s for you that I wash the used ones, that I nag my husband and children to do the same. Just hang them here to dry I say, we can reuse them again many times before we put them into our closet bag then stuff
that bag of bags into the grocery store recycle bin from which I walk away with faith that this final act wipes away all our sins but worried wondering if anyone really does right by you with this overflow of tired plastic bags placed here so that the virtuous, the dutiful among us can be delivered from the guilt of our transgressions.
Bless me Mother Earth for I have purchased Thai iced tea not knowing that this yellow straw would remain a stain somewhere in your innards for over two hundred years. I didn’t know the plastic bottles (every second of every day in the United States, a thousand thrown away) that I faithfully put into the blue plastic recycle bin would be shipped across your vast oceans all the way to India to make a mountain not of your soil, stone, trees, but of plastic we actually paid money for to slake our thirst now down-cycled they say to never truly disappear
Forgive me for giving into the convenience of this aluminum foil that I unroll (two hundred and twenty containers used every second—with its bauxite mined from your red dirt and clay on one of your continents far from me) to wrap around the ribs of an animal raised by a friend not transported hundreds of miles because you see I am trying to help you stay strong undiminished by the carbon footprint that’s become a number I calculate to know (16 metric tons average per person in the U.S. 4 metric tons average per person globally) what it is I’ve done, to be sure to be sure
Bless me Mother Earth for once I began to see I couldn’t stop seeing the bits of shredded blue tarp in our garden soil the plastic plant labels, potting trays plant pots, wheelbarrow, toothbrush, toothpaste tube, trellis netting, lawn chairs, dish soap, hand soap bottles…..
Forgive me for—still —I have not refused the job that requires I drive my fossil fuel fed car three hundred more miles a week and I am guilty too of turning the thermostat to 58 degrees in the first sudden cold days of fall using the oil extracted from deep within your body our invasion our intrusion thinking we can take whatever we want
You see there is so much more so very, very much more I could say I’ve only just begun but
let me not forget to say how deep is my gratitude for your green fields out my back window, your woods in which I walk and wonder and pray, your tenacious dandelion, eureka of forsythia, pink and orange flame of tulips in the yard before me stirring delight in this long awaited for spring day.
Denise Pendleton holds an MFA in Poetry from Washington University and is a recipient of The Jinx Walker Poetry Prize of the Academy of the American Poets. Her poems have appeared in American Sports Poems edited by May Swenson and Northwest Review, Tar River Poetry, and Kerning among others. Pendleton has taught writing to college students and held a variety of nonprofit jobs as an educator “from the balcony” to promote reading for all ages.
