Please don’t leave me

beached with other lonely ones
like a tombstone rising on a tide line
as a useless see-through windbreak
sucking a billion grains of sand

Please return me to

a machine marrying me to others
the reception of the receptacles
other transparencies
new possibilities for my future

Please don’t leave me

intruding in a sand dune
hidden like a trap
waiting to be drowned
emptied and forgotten

Please return me to

a new grip for drinking
those who’ll see me again and again
tidal waves of conveyer belts
plastic reinvention

Please don’t leave me

scattered by the random wind
with four centuries of dying
swelling whales like Jonah’s cries
digestible as poison

Please return me to

a better environment
seashore hands and filled anew
a broken link in the food chain
fresh thinking

One day to go until National Poetry Day and its theme of Messages, and here is another poem I have been working on using the ‘message in a bottle’ idea, linked to the current Surfers Against Sewage campaign for a national move to deposit return bottles, read here.

On the day it is also reported that discarded take-away coffee cups could each take 30 years to break down, these are no-brainer environmental issues and necessary suggestions for beginning to seriously deal with it.

This is another list poem idea that could be used in the classroom tomorrow, students perhaps engaged and enthused by the issue and expressing their thoughts and feelings in poetic messages.