Stirrings In The Gruel Sea - For The North Pacific Gyre And Its 100 Million Tons Of Garbage Poem by Keith Shorrocks Johnson

Turning and turning in the widening gyre
The void will not impede the reveller;
Things cast aside; an empty tale is told;
Banality is tossed upon the world,
The speck-filled tide is loosed, and everywhere
The purity of Eden’s shore is littered;
The best lack understanding, while the worst
Regale in pleasured apathy.

Surely some retribution is at hand;
Surely a Second Fall is now at hand.
A new exile mocking our Garden Genesis
Troubles my sight: somewhere in the seas of earth
A shape of plastic drifts where listless currents run
A haze blank and pointless as drunken daybreak fun
Is moving its dark slime, while all about it
Reel shadows of the flocking starveling birds.

The darkness deepens yet again; but now I know
That twenty centuries of slop have marred the deep
Have made the ocean Bumble’s ladle,
And we the silly, greedy festive crew at last
Slouch to perdition and still ask for more.


[with acknowledgement to William Butler Yeats]