Week 6 Writing Assignment
“You should have seen it.”
“The bag crosses the street. The bag takes flight.”
“It was like flying.”
A gust of wind pushes the plastic up higher and higher. The bag lifts its wings dipping down into the water.
The plastic disrupts the glint of the sun the lake.
And the lake moves to swallow the bag whole.
Each new piece of plastic is a lethal injection into the bloodstream of Life.
How could I not be dramatic? When the situation is this dire.
One bag might poison the edge of the lake.
But eight million metric tons of plastic a year will change worlds.
Entire ecosystems will disappear before we realize we’re not alone.
Why do we focus our efforts so far away when there are plenty of undiscovered aliens below the surface?
And while we’re looking up
The water is rising
The people are moving
Push and pull
Ebb and flow
We forget the power of water. We forget the essentiality of water, until we take that first sip after our throat runs dry. We forget the strength of water, until it takes the form of disaster and comes crashing towards us. We forget the unity of water, until what happens in one ocean is felt in the other. We forget the purity of water until the rains come and wash the past away. We forget the fluidity of water, until one toxin poisons the body.
The ocean groans with each new bag ingested.
When will we listen?
When the next sip of water catches plastic in our throat.
Process Notes
The idea of the plastic came to me when I was sitting with some friends and their bag flew away. One friend tried to run after it, but the wind carried the bag higher and higher. As my other friend was recounting the story, she said each of the quotations used at the beginning of the poem. And I thought about where the bag would go and what path it might take. My thoughts settled on the lake, as it was likely that the bag would get washed away with the tide. I then tried to trace the impact of environmental harm onto water. The result was tracing how the impacts on water will indeed affect humans. I plan on focusing on large bodies of water for my final project, particularly Lake Michigan and the Atlantic Ocean. The environmental concern that I am trying to highlight is how water is often overlooked as an essential, yet can also be replenished in the never-ending cycle. My aim is to connect the plastic bag to the bodies of water and show how we are poisoning our life source with each piece of waste that ends up in the ocean. I am trying to use the fear of an impending doom, the same way that DeLillo makes his characters fear death. The satire that DeLillo lends to a normally dark topic makes it almost comical, but it’s the fear of something coming that I am trying to imitate.
Emily Moos
