Naomi Shihab Nye - Cast Away: Poems of Our Time

For Cathy Song I couldnt save the world,but I could pick up trash. Blue plastic ring no setting no stone found on Diamond Head Road Someone else used to do this before.Someone responsible,someone who loved me enoughto protect me from my own filthpiling up.But Im over 40 now & live alone,& if I dont remember its Thursday& rise with the cardinals & bluejayscalling up the sun, Im stuckwith whats left rottingfor another week.I swing my legs like anchors over the sideof the bed & use the wall for leverageto stand, shuffle to the bathroom.In summer, I slide into a pair of shorts & flip flops,wandering room to room to collectwhat no longer serves me.I shimmy the large kitchen bag fromthe steel canister, careful not to spillwhats inside or rip it somehow& gross myself out.Sometimes I double bag for insurance,tying loose ends together,cinching it tightly for the journey.Still combing through webs of dreams,of spiders handiwork glistening abovethe wheeled container on the back patio,I drag my refuse down the drivewaypast the chrysanthemums & azaleas,the huge Magnolia tree shading the living roomfrom Georgias heat, flattening hordesof unsuspecting ants in my path to park itnext to the mailbox for merciful elvesto take off my hands.It is not lost on me that one daysomeone responsible,someone who loves me enoughwill dispose of this worn, wrinkledcontainer after my spirit soars on.I dont wait to say thank youto those doing this grueling, necessary work.But I do stand in the young, faintly lit airfor a long moment to inhale deeply,& like clockwork when he strides by,watch the joggers strong, wet backfade over the slight rise of the road. (Copyright 2018 by Kamilah Aisha Moon. Originally published in Poem-a-Day on October 24, 2018, by the Academy of American Poets) How much have you thrown away in your lifetime already? Do you ever think about it? Id like to see the things I threw away when I was eight or twelve or fourteen. The words discard or refuse dont seem appealing. Rubbishoften associated with the UKis a cozy word, like baby rabbits living inside tree stumps. Whatever you call it, trash and litterits existence on planet Earthhas fascinated me for a long time. There are places you cant get away from itthe aftermath of a Fiesta parade in my city of San Antonio, for exampleor the back streets of Mumbai, which many people still prefer to call Bombay.

I heard there wasnt any trash in Japan. So of course it was something I looked for right away upon arrival there and felt weirdly joyous to find a two-inch-tall yellow pencil on a beach, which instantly became the King of Pencils in my cloth pencil pouch. Trash cans used to be quirkier. Some were short, others metal, plastic, some green, some a debonair shiny silver, some with handles or separate lids... but now many Americans are living in the era of institutional giant cans, with wheels and handles. They seemed like scary animals at first.

You can easily sprain your wrist dragging a heavy one by one hand only, but this is all so they can be picked up by the two massive robotic arms of the trash truck, which is actually very fun to watch, if you are two years old. Clamp, lift, dumpits a hug at every housean urban rhythm. Cheers to the cities and stores that are banning plastic bags. Long overdue! Obviously its possible to use the same paper or cloth bag for a very long time, if you just train yourself to carry it in. And isnt it totally time to say farewell to straws that pierce and torture fish? Were all involved in this. The animals that die from eating plastic bags deserve better protection from humans.

This is my very obvious advice to people who want to make less trash. Reusable implements. Buy food items with less packaging if possible. Decline the extra napkins and utensils if you dont really need them. Carry your own cup. Its just a matter of getting into different habits.

Kids probably know more about the five trillion pieces of plastic in the oceans, in great swirling garbage patches, than many adults do. The largest scary congregationGreat Pacific Garbage Patchlives somewhere in that beautiful blue water between Hawaii and California. Good luck to the various styles of giant trash vacuumsthe Seabin Project, for oneheaded out into the waters from different shores to consume all this junk. I hope you are very hungry, vacuums. Where does this plethora of leavings come from? How long does it take you, even one little you, to fill the can by your desk? I am assuming thingsthat you have a desk. Really, a desk is a great luxury on planet Earth.

I am assuming you dont just throw everything onto the floor or ground around you when you are done with it. Apparently a lot of people still do that: see poems. If you live in a remote rural place in any country, you may be more aware of how much you dispose of than someone who lives in a cityin a city, its constantly being carted away. And its shocking. Its shocking how much trash we make. What does that say about us? Im not sure why, but it always seemed like my job to pick up trash whenever I saw it.

Perhaps this stems from being bicultural, belonging nowhere and everywhere at once, being a pleaser, always trying to make my parents and friends happy, or perhaps its a result of my preference for clean spaces. Once I signed a piece of paper supposedly mailed by the City of San Antonio, promising to pick up all the trash in a four-to-six-block radius of our house for the rest of my life. Was there really such a document? I am sure of it, but I have never met another person who signed one. I know I contemplated it briefly, then signed with a flourish and sent the self-addressed stamped envelope back to our city refuse department, feeling proud. How did they know me so well? Perhaps, though, my need to pick up trash stems from the fact that my mom was named the sloppiest person in her Soldan High School class senior yearbook (the same high school that Tennessee Williams attended years before her in St. Louis).

School yearbooks used to declare such thingsMost Likely to Succeed, Best Dressed, Sloppiest. My mom, a highly intelligent person who skipped two grades and went to college at sixteen on a full scholarship, could eat crackers in her bed and leave the crumbs lying around for weeks, on the floor, even under her pillow. She could leave stacks of dirty plates in her room and be able to fall asleep anyway. Even now (shes a chipper ninety-one), she prefers to pile up catalogs, hoards junk mail, retains snack bags, and never hangs up clothes. Why should she? She could wear the same ones tomorrow! Old newspapers rise in towers by every chair. But she can still do the entire crossword puzzle in fifteen minutes and is very particular and accurate about many things.

She reads five books at once and is a treasure trove of random details. Once my brother and I threw out some of her kitchen spices that were forty years old. These are not habits she has tried to cure, nor is she a bit ashamed of them. So naturally, as her daughter and older child attempting to maneuver through life, I was born the cleanup crew. And sometimes there were payoffs to being a trash collection girl. One happy day, age ten, I went out by myself in Ferguson, Missouri, with one dime in my pocket to buy a delicious orange-and-white Creamsicle on a stick at a corner store, and there, glittering by the mailbox, lay one shiny quarter.