Trash Vietnam Sea

Sophia Shan

I was standing on a cliff overlooking the sea

There was a steep decline to propped-up tents

and overpriced grilled seafood and fierce hagglers

just armed with just a few key words of English

for any tourist that came their way

If you followed the curved (or was it steep? I can’t remember)

rock-studded wall down on the left

it came to both a shore choked with trash

 

That gripped me with how ugly it was, how immovable

I didn’t know where the trash came from, this shore or another?

And if you cleaned it all up,

how long would it

take for more pieces and pieces to float back?

The act of being complicit in creating waste can’t be criminalized, either

Someone is buying food to feed his family and

brings it back in plastic bags bagged in plastic bags

Someone else is simply thirsty and comes up to the massive fridges

stacked with glowing bottles of water

 

My father said there needed to be some

large-scale community organization

Maybe rallied together for the sake of

bringing about tourism

And I cried,

because we were so helpless

 

Helpless, in the sense that our pollution will one day conquer

The depthless ocean,

90% of our surface cover that would meet us

on every side if we paced the small worlds

we live in, believing they are everything,

nothing, all-consuming

But not that we couldn’t have helped ourselves

 

The big problems will sink beneath the waves

Who will be held responsible when the floods come,

swallowing first the islands and places that have been silenced

by the “developed” world,

bringing up all of our filth?

 

As a kid in this world, I was taught

that we can do anything

that we need to be the heroes

Even when my parents or other adults

turned away from glaring injustices in the world

Even when my peers called me a “tree-hugger” like

it’s a bad thing

I held on

 

But no matter how hard

I do my part

Refuse straws, take public transportation,

adopt a plant-based diet

No matter if all of us middle-class consumers

cut our carbon emissions in half

 

Could we make more than a dent?

 

I made myself turn away

from the plastic landmass

after a moment

Because my emotion startled my dad,

I could tell

And we walked away with the whisper of

oil, coal, plastic tycoons laughing in the wind