i
No bill will pass in this parliament.
Lines divide like the muddy
Atlantic from garbage shores
garbage on streets, garbage
in manholes
garbage of history.
There’ll be no mopping up
of age-old hate. All will wallow
in rinds, Styrofoam, needles.
Garbage abounds in the old
Garden city, buildings plunked
on old Dutch canals that should
have kept things running.
ii
Of course, there’s no connection
between garbage and suicides,
foreign mines and noses turned
at city smells en route to dig out
jungles.
There’s no connection between
my poem and photographs:
a mound of friends, stray dogs,
garbage choking their say.
This poem “Guyana” originally appeared in Emerging Scholars. Spec. issue of Canadian Literature 226 (Autumn 2015): 17.
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