Predators
It started with the plastic containers.
We stacked them high, balanced unwieldy towers
like a unicyclist holding another human –
what skill, what steadiness.
We recycle, but we know from news headlines
a good many are buried:
contaminate soil, release toxins when burned,
run off into rivers.
Polymers don’t degrade, so
are best reshaped into a different form,
remade into a different killer.
Our ancestors died from diseases because
doctors didn’t yet understand germs,
how bacteria and viruses spread,
how a good hand washing can quell much disaster.
We die from our love of, our addiction to, convenience.
Try to find three things you use every day,
three things you’re using right now, that aren’t made from plastic …
Go!
And then there are the pesticides.
The broccoli we eat, our strawberries,
sprayed with chemicals to kill bugs,
to increase profits, not farmers’ faults,
those in power - regardless of aisle side -
always side with the mighty, the men who built
our country with banks and laundered opium-laced money
through colleges and art galleries, they need three quarters of
farmland
to feed the cars that feed the oil industry that feed their offshore
accounts.
And this is the food that’s good for us.
What about processed food possessed by our poorest –
lining the shelves of discount stores, the genius killing off
of our nation’s undesirables by making them desire and ingest
carcinogens,
feeding their kids spoonfuls, cash cawed by colorful canaries on
cardboard boxes;
this way we don’t have to wait for poison to seep into soil, wash
into water, absorb into pores,
the poor can …
Eat it! Drink it!
In communion with – one bread, one body, one congregation, one dying
nation under God,
indivisible, invading cells divisible and divisible, on Earth not in
Heaven, giving us on this day,
our daily dead, oppressed and betrayed by all.
Copyright 2025 Kathy Cable Smaltz
Bio:
Kathy Smaltz’s poems appear in journals and in her collection, Pieces. A VCCA creative fellow, she served as Prince William County’s Poet Laureate from 2016-2018. A wife, mother, and educator, Kathy and her husband have four (almost) grown children. She enjoys spending time outdoors – writing poems on mountaintops and beaches.
Donation Appeal:
To help victims of cancer and to help foster continuing research into this deadly disease, please consider donating to either The American Cancer Society or The Leukemia and Lymphoma Society.
Thank you.
30 for 30 is sponsored by Potomac Review
