Member Poem

I pull the recyclable yogurt container
from the garbage and say to my daughter:
This doesn’t belong in there.
She dismisses it, and me,
because she doesn’t see it impact
her future. What I don’t say
is that each of us, on average, makes
seven pounds of trash a day, like every
other American, and by week’s end
that’s 147 pounds of garbage Dad
will haul on rollers to the curb.
We’re just one household.
Since we’re at work, we never hear
the screaming gears of the waste
management truck, witness the midair
dump from our pungent little chariot
that is magically empty
when we return home.
How convenient to roll her back and start
the process all over again.
We are spared the stacking
and shoving of our rotting food scraps,
packages and containers and paper products
that for decades will try to decompose into the earth,
becoming more shapeless, more nameless
in its building-high gradations of tormented color.
We are spared the skittering birds that drum up
some dead thing among the bursting seams.
We are spared the endless methane
emissions, the sludge, the stench, the bacteria.
All of it—out of sight so spared the 300-foot-high
immortal slum of our bygones.
Hard to believe. But it is true.
So our job remains simple and easy:
just keep tossing it all into the garbage.