Ekphrastic Challenge 6

The winning poem and a selection chosen by editor and judge, Emily Tee

Plastic Mero by Bordalo ii (photograph by Emily Tee)

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I'm grateful for everyone who shared their creative takes on the powerful sculpture Plastic Mero by Bordalo ii and produced a wide variety of poems.  I particularly enjoyed the poets who used layout and formatting, word play, humour and lively imagery to enhance their writing. I hope you enjoy reading the selection included in the newsletter.

This contest sparked a lot of great writing giving me the longest 'shortlist' I've had so far for potential winners.  In a strong field the winning poem used captivating and sumptuous language and was engaging from the very first read..

Other poems which particularly stood out for me were: Polymare, How darling is an ugly junk-fish? and Discarded.

Thanks to everyone who entered and congratulations to the winner.

-Emily Tee, editor and judge of our Ekphrastic Challenges.

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Congratulations to Mary Beth Kaplan from the United States for her winning poem! A Wee Sparrow Poetry Press dragonfly notebook is winging its way to her.

Soft Power

fishtailing, 
before readjusting warm bodies, pausing;
drinking in life's aqua nectar, breathing;
moving with the current,
through swirling whirlpools, 
catching rip currents and riding high waves,
allowing hope to float to the top,
nestling within clean, homey 
biomes of bubbly seafoam,
feeling my own soft power release me 
into wide open, fresh, 
unpolluted,
cancer-free
waters

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Illustration by Colin Thom (included in our anthology Ourselves in Rivers and Oceans.)

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Silence

Silence by the piers where this morning
passed large ships and people cheered
watching the whales sing in the distance.
My mother's left fin smells of seaweed today,
though her milk is laced with fine green dust
that smells of fishermen and their dead catch.

Further north in the bay, a nook of pine trees
rises from the boulders overlooking
the red, the blue, the purple; the rainbow
of unnatural scattered remains
where the ocean should only be touching
old crab shells and seal skins long dead.

A corrugated sheet of pink coated plastic
should grow no root in this sacred place.

A man will come and collect bits and pieces
to build his work of art and woe.
Another will come and throw broken tiles
and rusty hooks that will pierce my mother's fin.
It will smell of seaweed no more.

Ramona McCloskey
Ireland

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The Sea of Amensalism 

The bike wheel bobs up and down, spinning in circles with nowhere to go. Once ridden by an enthusiastic child learning to ride. That child is grown up now. No longer needs the bike. 

The laundry basket bounced with each wave. It used to be filled with children’s clothes ready to be cleaned for a new day. The children grew up and moved away.

The fishing boat delicately dancing on the sea foam. Father and son spending long summer days hoping for a catch. The father passed away and the son did not want the sadness attached.

The net weaves in the water catching on the rocks. Once used by fisherman to catch the day and feed a community. Then the supermarket opened and fishing was no longer needed.

The sea has been ravaged by the overconsumption and wastefulness of its users and admirers. The symbiosis replaced with amensalism.

Norman Dearlove-Scott

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Polymare

The cellophane blue of plastic 
in wide ocean opens like a canvas. 

As the light reaches through
it could almost be stained glass instilled

with the power to change light into hue.
Sea-forged becomes man made, 

scales travel octaves of polymers, 
of polystyrene reefs made of coral

and polyvinyl chloride. Names that force lips
to contort, names that are spawned

in a lab, words compounded in Franken-forms
not ocean grown or born in the blue cradle

of their own home. The earth is stripped bone.
Gills gulp down motes and specks

of moments, where monsters outlive their masters
in cellophane synthetic seas. 

EM Davis

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Discarded

picking up
 p         c      e  s
    i  e              
of myself
among the detritus
useful relevant 
p i e   c   e   s
cast aside
discarded like
fast fashion single use seasonal must-haves delivered tomorrow individually packaged items
putting myself
b     a   c   k     t  o g ether
whole
again
with a purpose
and to think
I was once 
considered
washed up

Tina Mowrey

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Eyes of a Child
 
Inside the belly of a whale swam a little fish
and every day the whale swam the fish grew bit by bit
 
it grew with straws, it grew with nets
it grew with little beads
it grew with ropes, it grew with clothes
it grew with things we didn’t need
 
and when one day the whale stopped and washed up on the beach
no amount of pushing could wake it from its sleep
as they bared its vast inside the little fish stared back
fossilised in detritus time-stamped to human hands
piece by piece a tale was told of oceans in a mess
of sea life doomed to deep dark black, lost and in distress
the fish intrigued passers-by who came to circle round
ignoring all the rubbish rooting in the ground
 
all except one
a child of three
who collected plastic wraps
to shape into the little fish
she could see
under all the trash …
 
Anna Dean

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Art-a-fish-cial

Discard dorsals, Dunlop eyes
And a laundry basket tongue
Shingles and scrappy leftovers
Where shimmering scales once hung

Tell me, Fish, what have you done 
To your perfect form and function?
“The humans kept giving me gifts!”
Oh, you’ve mistaken poison for unction!

“First a pail and then a boot..
There was really nothing to it!
With each arrival, I would modify.
Humans showed me how to do it!”
 
Tell me, Humans, what have you done
This is a tragic transformation!
You’ve filled their heads with garbage 
And pamphlets of misinformation!

You’ve disguised your deadly discards 
As noble bequests and magic potions!
Now sterling nekton and crystal seas
Are plastic anchors in polystyrene oceans!

Kristine Stern
Rhode Island, United States 

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On Ekphrasis
 
             for Kawika
 
Literally, I say, “You don’t describe it.”
My friend knows Greek, word origins, and Baroque art.
            With warriors he’s broached Caravaggio,
Narcissus awestruck over that pool of water.
He does this, circles back to what we think we know.
We skip the Styx, Ovid, his Metamorphoses.
               “Syntax, grammar, punctuation, basics,” I stress.
Soon it’s rhetoric: ethos, logos, pathos.
But we haven’t discussed it’s a device.
“You’re a storyteller and you get pathos,
elemental in poetry,” I drone on.
              “I’m awful at it,” I admit, “emotion.”
He jumps in: “This fish, the Mero, has swallowed men.”
He’s from an island, people who fish and surf.
           Neither fisherman nor fish, I am the squid
bug-eyed, over its plexiglass tongue—echoing.
He intuits this, metaphor and allegory.
“You should write for it,” I say, fly buzzing—drowning
smack dab dead-center of my mug, literally.
 

Robert E. Ray
USA 

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Orange Boot Tail

Frankenstein’s got nothing on Bordalo II. Every day I feel more alive—more
appreciated. Thanks, dad. One of these days, when we have a tidal surge, I’ll
be off into the ocean—onto a new adventure. With the intense fluctuations
from climate change, I feel a torrential rain coming on any day—fins crossed.

Luckily, the garbage that people put in my mouth sustains me—half empty
cans of pop, paper bags with fries, pickles, catsup packets. Pizza boxes with
half-chewed crust, mushrooms, onion, pepperoni. Not too shabby. I’m made
for junk food—ha! The kids and cats that climb over me feel pretty good, too.

Most people seem to admire me, but some start crying. Others just shake
their head in silence. I am a piece of art, so it makes sense. The only thing
that really annoys me is when people tug on my orange boot tail. Why do
they always have to do that? I love my boot. Just leave it alone, dammit.

John S Green
Jordan

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Ode to an Upcycled Fish

Trash fish, trash fish.
You ain’t no octopus.

No undersea world for you.
You’re going to last a long time.

Maybe forever.
Much longer than an octopus.

Trash fish. Hey, trash fish!
Dry bricks outline your splendid belly.

Rain lapped your dorsal fin.
For now, though, you’re beached.

Part red, part yellow, part blue,
Part net, part hole, part lost and forgotten.

You can’t disintegrate,
but one day you might fall apart.

Trash fish, oh trash fish.
You beautiful garbage fish, you.

No one can eat you.
You win.

Linda Doughty
USA

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A Malleable Hereafter

Drug through time
debris makes up the body
relics discarded and gathered
now dry heavily on the shore
 
Each fragment an altar
recovered moments
mosaics of memory
reborn in changed form
 
Renewal breathes ragged
jagged and juxtaposed
rescues from a society's clogged pores
a stand alone testament of what we try to hide
 
This is the other side of death
after the suffocation, after the drowning
this is the carcass saved and reused
this is how it began, this is where it will begin

Corinne Casella
United States 

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How darling is an ugly junk-fish?

I marvel at how all the hallmarks 
Of a violently unfolding world
Can be forced into the scaley skin
Of one savaged, little beastie
Who cannot possibly contain 
The enormity of harm,
Who bulges and underbites grotesquely 
The catastrophic excesses 
Of what has been neglectfully strewn.
It is immense greed 
Rallying the makers to take charge of
Creating effigies from endless waste;
Gifting us the deplorable,
Returned as remarkable art,
To remind us of how we have failed
Life, all our futures and the planet.

Karen E Fraser

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Strange Creature
 
Washed up from the salty brine’s embrace
Caught in the nets and waste of human folly
Its eye a dagger to a guilty heart
 
Once sleek and silver, now a martyr
To the tragedy of greed
In a fast-tracked cast-off world
 
But still we pillage, plundering depths,
Letting waste flow freely,
Poisoning and polluting every path
 
Into a world where only sculpture,
Made from plastic, tin and nets
Holds a key to what’s been lost

Helen Seymour
Australia

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breathless-
the fishes´ gills
filled with plastic 

Katherine E Winnick 

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Illustration by Colin Thom (included in our anthology Ourselves in Rivers and Oceans.)

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Here´s Emily Tee´s super poem -

Harvesting the Sea


      A Golden Shovel after "Delectable Duchy"
               by Sir John Betjeman

Can you see him out there, always swimming on the
tide? Plastic Mero powers through, as the surf-line
washes yet more rubbish ashore.  Sea foam lisps
and sucks at it, a tongue probing a rotten tooth with
careful curiosity.  Today it's mostly bottles, wrappings,
old pieces of smashed up bucket, plastic footballs of
every colour and design.  A single shoe, about potato
size but dyed bright blue, lies in the sun and crisps.

Plastic Mero tries his best, but all the terrible tribute
keeps on arriving. He swims, gobbling up mouthfuls of
seaborne plastic from all around him, all the broken
shiny aspirations sold by glossy ad campaigns, plastic
wipe-clean hopes and dreams, geegaws, trinkets and toys.

A scuttling hermit crab roams the detritus and sees it glitter,
makes home in an old takeaway container, not a shell, with
no thought it is caught up in the consumer cycle. Harvest
is bountiful for gulls but now their chicks' bellies are full of
slivers and beads of microplastics and they are dying, the
latest species to learn that not everything under the August
sun is golden, not the sands, not the future - there's only litter.

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And a wee haiku from me echoing Basho´s exemplary poem -

old pond
rubbish chucked
water pongs!

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Illustration by Colin Thom (included in our anthology To Live Here.)

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You know the drill, you lovely lot, stay well and stay creative.

Claire