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myra schneider by ben schneider 2

Myra Schneider
 (Photo: Ben Schneider)

As her contribution to Enfield's Big Green Climate Festival, local poet Myra Schneider has asked me to share one of her poems on an environmental theme.

Becoming Plastic was originally published in Acumen magazine and will be one of the poems in Myra's next book, Siege and Symphony, which will be published in October by Second Light Publications.

Becoming Plastic

The morning starts with a tiresome battle to slit
and peel skin that fits smoothly as a seal’s.
It’s encasing two tubs of vitamin capsules

but my fingers can’t find leverage and anger
blazes as the sleek containers continue to cling
in their see-through wrapping like inseparable lovers.

Nowadays, everything arrives cosied in plastic:
sultanas, tissues, pears, jumpers, knickers,
the mattress that was tricky to manoeuvre upstairs,

those newly-erected six-storey flats I scanned
yesterday as I walked over Regent’s Canal, each
swaddled in the stuff as if it couldn’t cope with rain.

In the night I dreamt I struggled through a wild sea
to an island of unrotted rubbish and weakling palms.
A sound of laboured breathing rose from the debris

and I knew plant roots underneath were striving
to survive. A dead grouper stared from a pram
which had lost all its wheels, someone screamed.

I turned, was just in time to see a woman
on a bed with legs parted and a midwife plucking
from her womb a baby sheathed in plastic sheeting.

© 2019, Myra Schneider

Links

Myra Schneider's website

Poetry in Motion - Myra Schneider talks to Basil Clarke about the inspiration for her poetry

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