Ode on a Plastic Starbucks Cup
By Benjamin Thorne
This poem owes its genesis to the quite literal discovery of the titular cup while on a nature walk, which made me think about the long-term effects of plastics in our habita, as well as what archeologists of the future might glean from such an artifact about our culture; this in turn brought to mind John Keats’s ingenious poem, “Ode on a Grecian Urn”.
Walking along a creek bank I find
half-buried beneath leaf-litter
a Starbucks cup, stained and trampled.
The sea-queen stares back haughtily,
her faded raiment, once emerald green,
resembles now a paler sage; yet still
her pursed smile remains intact.
How wise this refuse Mona Lisa,
to refuse decay as coyly
as a princess does a suitor!
Plastic polymer bonds cohere
with immutable tenacity, preserving
the inscrutable veracity behind her grin….
or perhaps a smirk, knowing in the end
she’ll win. Centuries hence she will abide,
if not here then on the tides or entwined
with stone. Parts of her may even live
as particles within our blood,
that generations hence will yield
a strange bud, host to some hybrid flower.