What is plastic? (a poem by Sofia Castro Teixeira)

A child said What is plastic? walking along the beach and fetching it to me with full hands;

How could I answer the child? I do not know what it is any more than she.

 

I guess it has become the flag of human disposition, out of colorful polymers woven.

 

If the handkerchief of Nature is green, they melt and merge to return to black,

The sight of crude oil,

Branding the owner’s name on the wings of sea birds, pelicans and gulls,

on the slippery slick smooth bellies of dolphins and whales, shifting and sticking as they writhe in the water,

penetrating and spilling into the very act of breathing.

Branding the owner’s name into the corners, the crevices under a turtle’s shell, so that they may wash ashore,

and we may say, whose?

referring to the guilt. 

 

Or I guess it is a popsicle stick, or a soda bottle, a mid-afternoon snack, a toothbrush,

 

Or I guess it is a uniform hieroglyphic,

And if hieroglyphics tell simply by existing, simply by being still,

Then it means the process of dying, bleeding alike in broad zones and narrow zones,

For richer or for poorer, but always for poorer,

Flowing and settling among oceans as well as rivers,

The Pacific, Atlantic, the Tagus or the Nile, we give them the same, we receive them

              the same.

 

And now it seems to me the bleak empty shells of sea snails, the whitening of corals,

the skeletons of leafy seadragons,                                                                                    

plastic is winter.

 

It may be that it falls from every hand,

It may be the guilt is nearly everyone’s,

power is not.

It may be we are from old people, offspring who leapt out of our mother’s laps,

Does it stick to their thighs like sand?

 

I will tell you what has become of the young and the old men,

of the women and the children:

the old die, the young will too,

and until then,

 

We will be alive and sick somewhere,

The smallest pieces of green, yellow and blue,

Black, in our very tissues,

But if death exists, so does life,

We must not wait for the end for it to be so,

It is from the very beginning.

 

All goes onwards and inwards,

fumes into lungs, black into all,

ice into water, water into shores,

And to live is different from what any one supposed, and sadder.

We must make a demand for spring.