THE GREAT PACIFIC GARBAGE PATCH

a mirror poem

by Elise Kazanjian

What were we all thinking?

An abandoned fishing boat  toothbrushes

six tons of gill nets   toys   lawn chairs   plastic

containers   a three and a half ton  mysterious object twenty

feet wide six feet high   shoes    millions miniscule plastic waste bits    trawling

booms   plastic rods  tires   huge foam buoys  stewing in the Great Pacific Garbage Patch three 

times the size of France  growing every day    in 2009 the non-profit Ocean Voyages

Institute’s 132-foot sailing cargo ship begins removing plastics from the ocean    

many of us move mouths    jaw about oceans     threatened oceans that give

life to all creatures    oceans once polluted can not be salvaged   

What were we all thinking?

 

What are we all thinking?

The oceans once polluted can not be salvaged      so many creatures

humans    given life    many of   us move mouths        jaw about oceans     threatened    

in 2009 the  non-profit Ocean Voyages Institute’s132-foot sailing cargo ship

begins removing plastic from the Great Pacific Garbage Patch three times

the size of France   growing every day   millions miniscule plastic waste bits     trawling

booms   plastic rods    tires   marine debris  stewing with lawn chairs    

plastic containers   a three and a half ton mysterious object twenty

feet wide six feet high    shoes   toothbrushes    six tons

of gill nets    toys   an abandoned fishing boat  

What were we all thinking?

Elise Kazanjian’s poems have appeared in Fog & Light: San Francisco Seen Through the Eyes of the Poets Who Live Here 2021; the Marin Poetry Center Anthology 2022, and others. She was Foreign Editor, CCTV, Beijing; has been a San Francisco pawnbroker; and is Co-Judge, Prose Poem, Soul-Making Keats Literary Competition.

ELEGY FOR THE FRENCHMAN

by M.F. Nagel   

The Butte. Good Friday.

The Frenchman is dead.
Bow your head.
Say a prayer.

The Frenchman is dead.

Hopped a train -- age eight.
Joined the carney,
Challenged
The wall of death.

The Frenchman is dead, bow your heads, say a prayer.

                               Went to sea
Became a sailor
Seller of moonshine
Turned creator of gold-plated contraptions
Lost on the moon.

The Frenchman is dead.
                                        Bow your head. Say a prayer.

Married.
Moved his wife to a gravedigger shack
Near the Butte
Next to the Queen of the Angels
Cemetery,
Eying
Rivers and mountains and glaciered filled skies.

The Frenchman is dead.
-- Self-proclaimed:
Proprietor of
Boot Hill Auto Salvation.
(Antique and classic)
                                        His life’s ambition
Read and written
In the Holy Grail of
Abandoned car parts
                     -- A creaking
Harrisville Ferris wheel reaching to heaven,
And
Trunks and hoods -- and
Tires
And horns, and headlights.
Twisted skeletons of wasted steel.
Junkyard dreams.
Waiting . . .
All waiting in the weeds
For the salvage of judgment day.

The Frenchman is dead.
Bow your head. Say a prayer.

“Brother of The Third Wheel,”
He was
Iron crossed.
Road a pan head
223-pieces of gold.

The Frenchman is dead.
Today.
Took his last custom-made ride
On the wild Matanuska winds --

The Frenchman is dead.
Bow your head. Say a prayer.

M.F. Nagel was born in anchorage Alaska. Her Athabaskan and Eyak heritage gave her a love of poetry. M.F. now lives and writes near the banks of the Matanuska river in the Palmer Butte, Alaska, where the moose, wild dog-roses and salmonberries provide unending joy and inspiration.