Talking Rubbish...

Snow flakes
           fall like confetti
ice-cold on oil-dark sea
           melt at the touch
and are gone
            the sea absorbing them completely
as it absorbs all that fall into it -
or so we thought
                and threw in far too much.

Below the surface
                 - say seven thousand feet -
where oil-dark turns to total blindness
hydro-thermal vents
                   (underwater geysers,
                   "black smokers", as they're called)
spew iron and sulphide -
four hundred centigrade, let's say - too hot
for any creature known to us to live.
But even there our waste is killing them.

          Strange, eyeless adaptations
          of entities we thought we knew.
          Like creatures out of some Sci Fi
          thriving in a temperature
          four times our boiling point

          and poisoned by our heavy metals.

A small boy drops a lolly stick.
Rain washes it:
down drains;
           through sewers;
                          to the sea
where currents known as gyres
shepherd it onto a floating tip
now growing exponentially

          factory waste, insecticides
          toxic chemicals and human tissue
          plastics, high and low grade radiation
          and waste from hospitals.

How many little boys
to make this tip -
as it now is -
two U.S.A.s in size?