Garden Waste

A thought experiment: what if my garden became my bin?

I cannot remember when I first became conscious about the notion that rubbish does not cease to exist after it is sent away. Regardless, since this moment of realisation, I have never been able to get the thought out of my head. Every time I go to throw out the rubbish, I spare a thought for the people whose garden it does end up in, the land that is smothered, the air that grows thick. It’s so easy to forget about the stuff that just piles up somewhere else because it’s true: out of sight, out of mind. What we seem to forget it that not only does it impact someone else instead, the effects have a way of finding their way back to affect us too, as after all the Earth’s systems remain connected. Maybe we ought to start thinking more about our consumption.

Garden Waste

In the name of the administration  
We hereby announce
Rubbish must stay in the nation
No longer is this a mere abstraction
From now on we take control of our actions

Wheeling away the wheelie bins
For the last time loaded with my material things
The sight I thought was quite tragic
Considering its trick, a wondrous magic

So in the garden I started to dump
One bag became two, three, four, then a lump
It grew and grew, the pile spilled over
Settling into a cancerous composure

Through the house it came 
In-and-out
Mercilessly gripped in the material spout
That spewed into the garden
My flowers all died
Sitting at my window for the first time I cried

So I bordered up the shutters 
What’s hidden cannot utter
A word to make me feel bad
Or sad or mad, not even a tad
At least that’s how I used to cope
When the wheelie bin still provided hope

I promise I have tried
Cried in my attempt to hide
Bin bags breaking at the seams
But my phone tells me 
I must maintain an aching endless need
Even the things I don’t want but need 
Like fruit and veg, food we let bleed
I would try and grow things on my own
But no seed should be sewn 
In what has subconsciously become my home

My now steaming piled up heap 
Because all of this stuff I cannot keep
Rather it swallows up the patio and the lawn
The air stifled no longer screams out at dawn
Even the animals I have started to mourn

What a silly idea I often think
The administration is sending us all to the brink
Yesterday the water turned brown in my sink 
Now what am I supposed to drink, I think

My home is becoming one big dump
I wish it were different but alas 
The ever growing lump
That I cannot control, it’s our way of life
The circle of life, within it our strife

Once upon a time there was a way of framing
Waste as something that we could send sailing
Over the horizon to a fantasy land
Another island also made of sand
Oh wait, hang on, that too is my mother’s land