An Octopus Picks Litter at the End of the World
![Cherry Cherry](/sites/abctales.com/themes/abctales_new/images/cherry.png)
![Pick of the Month Pick of the Month](/sites/abctales.com/themes/abctales_new/images/pom.png)
By MistakenMagic
- 2188 reads
A serrated bottle cap. A triangle of green glass.
These are unusual shells: strange, immortal tools
that she collects during a morning’s foraging.
The ring pull from a tin can slides over one tentacle tip
like the closing of a trap, but still she swims onwards,
a chameleon umbrella, shimmering like an oil spill.
She adapts. This alien debris has bewildered her
fellow sand-dwellers, but she is an architect, a pioneer.
A cave of can. An inverted volleyball is an ample bowl.
Yet she is also a soothsayer, a creature of Cassandra.
She senses the prickle of warmer water, the stirrings
of a terrible future. The sky is already falling around her.
A kinder death awaits. She is beginning to mimic
the gentle bloating of plastic bags across the blue.
Soon, she will retire to the darkness of a car tyre,
its black, fraying edges floating like a shroud.
Swelling with eggs, she will guard her nest:
starving artist, sacrifice, prophet-martyr.
AN: This poem is from my debut collection, Walrussey, published by The Black Cat Poetry Press, available to purchase here: https://www.blackcatpress.co.uk/product-page/walrussey
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Comments
This is wonderful in every
This is wonderful in every sense - thank you so much for sharing it on here MM. Could you please add a link at the foot of the poem so people can buy your book?
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haha - the thrill never goes
haha - the thrill never goes away does it! I'm sure someone will want to place an order when they read it and now it's very easy for them to do so!
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Sorry, Rebecca, the link
Sorry, Rebecca, the link gives this result: This product couldn't be found
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https://www.blackcatpress.co
https://www.blackcatpress.co.uk/product-page/walrussey
I can't see any difference between the two links, but this one does seem to work for me. Does it for you Luigi?
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of course, it's cherry picked
of course, it's cherry picked. A wondeful expression of life and poetry, perhaps not in that order.
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What a delightful poem, and
What a delightful poem, and how it brings to life the octopus; I particularly liked how you've shown how she (octopus) adapts our discarded junk to for her own use; and am I right that the octopus sacrifices herself in giving birth?
Dougie Moody
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Hi Magic,
Hi Magic,
I read your poem. It's so deeply observed and a potent reminder of what we are doing to our beautiful oceans on our exceptional planet earth. How the Octopus has adapted to its enviroment brings your message home to the reader.
Jenny.
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This is our Poem of the Month
This is our Poem of the Month - Congratulations!
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I did not know about the
I did not know about the mother starving to death beside her eggs. The sadness of this natural end of such an intelligent, beautiful and mysterious being, within the dying environment we cause, oblivious, I found really powerful and moving
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