Throw-Away Culture

Disposable diapers
and babies in trash cans.
Dogs, cats, and children
ejected from cars.

Milk and beer bottles
shattered on curbways.
Rickety sofas, tattered old mattresses
clumsily discarded along country lanes.

Venerable men in tucked-away rest homes
lost between numbers, forgotten by sons.
Tiny old women with old-fashioned recipes
rocking away in quaint wooden chairs.

Wrapper and soda cans,
bent forks and plastic
Hidden so easily
beneath grains of sand.

Ill-conceived romances
abruptly concluded.
Stories half-written
never quite told.

Clandestine weapons and nuclear garbage
quickly stockpiled but slowly abandoned--
Hastily, cautiously
secreted somewhere.

Thirty-cent workers
and ten-dollar wallets
Made in some country
just out of the way.

Causes and picket signs
fading from memory.
Protests and sit-ins
now part of the past.

Effortless promises
easily broken.
Goals set in earnest--
goal-lines not crossed.

Manifest Destiny--
Darwin distorted.
Survival of the fittest--
but not of the fit.

The Gospel of Wealth--
The Protestant Ethic.
God in the Heavens
(c)ries of despair. . .

Then Simon says,
"We ain't got no culcha."
But I says,
"We've thrown it away!"

Rosemary Jenkins

Image: Bigstock Photo