National Poetry Month: Water Pollution

 Petie Macaroni

Giampetro Maroni, aka Petie Macaroni
put his plate in the sink and walked out of the kitchen
His mother shouted from the living room
"Put'a you plate in'a dishwash
Like I toll you tousand time
Madonna!"

Maroni took the plate
smeared with pasta sauce
from the sink and put it in the dishwasher
Then he went to the hall closet
reached up to the shelf
and took down his Glock 17
with its customized grip

He checked to see that it was loaded
and then slipped it into the waistband at the back of his pants
He took a black leather jacket from a hanger
and shrugged his considerable bulk into it
He patted his front pocket for his keys
his back pocket for his wallet
and walked out the front door
His mother shouted
"Doan slam'a da door!"

Weeks later
after Petie hadn't been heard from
Mama Maroni would wonder if she'd driven her oldest son away
with all of her haranguing

That wasn't the case
Petie would've come back home
had he been able to swim up from forty feet under the Passaic River
with two concrete blocks tied to his ankles
and having inhaled a toxic soup of muddy water
mixed with
cadmium
lead
mercury
and cancer-causing
tetrachlorodibenzo-p-dioxin
 ________________________________________
Maxus, Tierra Solutions, owned by the Diamond Alkali plant in Newark, NJ, dumped cancer-causing dioxin in the Passaic a half century ago while manufacturing the infamous Vietnam-era defoliant Agent Orange.

Documentation indicates that the Argentine Company YPF SA hatched a scheme to siphon assets away from its subsidiary, Maxus, so it could declare bankruptcy and avoid paying out possibly hundreds of millions of dollars toward cleaning up the Passaic, which is so polluted that the lower portion of the river is a Superfund site.

According to the EPA’s latest National Rivers and Streams Assessment, 46% of our Nation’s rivers and streams are in poor biological condition, with only 28% in good condition. Human health screening values for mercury in fish tissue are exceeded in 13,144 miles of U.S. river length. In 23% of river and stream length, samples exceed an enterococci threshold level for protecting human health. Waters with high levels of bacteria may be unsafe for swimming and other types of contact recreation, let alone drinking.

National Poetry Month: Climate Change

Kayaking along Market Street

The waters are rising

Inundating islands

occupied by the innocent

Surging over cities seething

with the unrepentant

Kayaking along Market Street

enjoying the novelty

Until Charleston became a swamp
_________________________________________

According to our government's Fourth National Climate Assessment Report, the social, economic, and environmental systems along the coasts are being affected by climate change. Threats from sea level rise (SLR) are exacerbated by dynamic processes such as high tide and storm surge flooding, erosion, waves and their effects, saltwater intrusion into coastal aquifers and elevated groundwater table, local rainfall, river runoff, increasing water and surface air temperature, and ocean acidification.

Although storms, floods, and erosion have always been hazards, in combination with rising sea levels they now threaten approximately $1 trillion in national wealth held in coastal real estate and the continued viability of coastal communities that depend on coastal water, land, and other resources for economic health and cultural integrity. The effects of the coastal risks posed by a changing climate already are and will continue to be experienced in both intersecting and distinct ways, and coastal areas are already beginning to take actions to address and ameliorate these risks. Charleston is one such city. Others are ignoring them, or even prohibiting their mention in city planning documents.

April 2019 is National Poetry Month

According to T.S. Eliot, "April is the cruelest month...," It's also National Poetry Month, the largest literary celebration in the world. Go to poets.org to see 30 ways to celebrate National Poetry Month.

I will post one poem every week of April, each on a different topic I care about: #ClimateChange, #Immigration, #GunViolence, #Poverty, and a bonus on #Genomics. I invite you to do the same.

Eliot's poem, The Waste Land, from which the lines, "April is the cruelest month" come, ends:
Datta. Dayadhvam. Damyata.
Shantih shantih shantih

You may be familiar with these terms if you practice or have studied Hinduism and/or Buddhism. I haven't, but when I first read the poem in my "formative years," I looked them up, and then followed the threads to Buddhism and flirted with becoming a monk. Unfortunately, I was not permitted to wear a robe and sandals in the military, so abandoned that flirtation, and instead focused my amorous attentions on a pretty Air Force nurse who was tending to my ills. That led to a sudden profusion of love poems, too embarrassing to publish.

In this time of Trump, I hope for you,
Datta. Dayadhvam. Damyata
Shantih