Journey McAndrews
The Gulf Deepens
Between the haves and the have-nots,
lies a gulf of materialism,
deep enough to bury us all
beneath piles of
plastic products,
hypodermic needles,
dirty diapers,
and broken G.I. Joe “men”.
British Petroleum now joins the ranks
of other big companies,
who cannot suture the wounds
they have inflicted on earth.
And the rest of us just want to fill our SUV’s
with cheap gas,
so we can beat the crowd to Wal-Mart
and stock up on the latest “Rollbacks”.
Outrage comes swift and easy,
then slides between the headlines
of the latest Washington scandal.
Along the way,
precious life is swallowed alive,
someone has to pay for our sins,
who will miss a few birds?
a few grains of sand?
a little water?
a few fish?
A small price to pay really,
to keep our lifestyle alive and well.
By God, to behave any other way
is un-American.
Let the fish drown in the sludge,
let the birds struggle to breath,
let the water burn.
In the end,
God will come and save us all,
right?
Journey McAndrews is a poet and essayist who was born in the coalfields of Eastern Kentucky. Her work regularly appears in Kentucky Monthly, and has appeared in Motif, LILOPOH, and Inscape, among other journals. She lives in Lexington and received her MFA in Creative Nonfiction with a minor in Poetry from Spalding University in Louisville. Journey has received an Individual Artist Grant from the Kentucky Foundation for Women and an AWP Writer-to-Writer Mentorship. She is a Writing Mentor at the Carnegie Center for Literacy and Learning in Lexington, teaches Feature Writing at Eastern Kentucky University, and is studying to become a Clinical Mental Health Counselor. She just completed a food memoir, I Eat My Peas with Honey, and is co-authoring a book of food essays and poems with poet and activist Jay McCoy.
Photo: Carrie Wilson Photography
This poem appeared in The New Verse News.