When We Take Over | Teen Ink

When We Take Over

August 4, 2023
By Anonymous

Eternal blight to land,
And a poison to the sea,
Littering coast and communities,
Plastic products are we.

We are unstoppable,
Irresistible in our advance,
A scourge spreading everywhere:
You don’t even stand a chance.

Scared?
We have yet to begin
Our eternal reign of toxic pain,
Destroyer of your kin.

We prey on your weakness
And dominate your homes,
Your short, meaningless lives;
We send a chill down to your bones.

Worshiped in every city,
Plotting our next act,
Increasing our numbers every year:
380 million metric tons, to be exact.

We scoff at your futile efforts
To recycle, reuse, reduce—
Such lazy, half-hearted works:
What a pathetic excuse.

We fear only those among you
Willing to take a stand:
The heroes who vow
To remove us from every part of pure lands.

Like Isatou Ceesay of Gambia,
Who cut and wove us into goods,
And sold us in the city for money;
We no longer rule her neighborhoods.

Phra Mahapranom Dhammalankara
Even worse: he turned us into clothes.
Preached, “It’s the Buddha’s will,
To recycle trash into robes.”

Or the feared Afroz Shah of India,
Who ended our Versova Beach reign,
Removing us from all his lands,
Which we strive to take back again.

For we’ll creep into every corner
All the seas and every land
Suffocated your shores,
Ever-willing to expand.

Just imagine: a trash-filled wasteland
Of us and us alone,
An endless sea of plastics,
An eternal desert of our own.

Trust us: don’t be like them:
With lives filled with endless work,
Destroying all our efforts,
Like plastic-hating jerks!

Our reign is now: the era of us.
Call us vicious, or even malicious,
But the taste of power when we take over:
Delicious.


The author's comments:

I hate trashed beaches. They reek of helplessness and despair, but mostly of plastics. I thought, if I could just get some people to listen to the plastic problem from the plastics' point of view, then they might double-think the next time they litter or waste.


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