There it stuck, twenty feet up.

It waved from a cleft at the base of a tuft
of proud fronds marching:

Mylar Silver and Nestle Blue,
it fluttered. This was its Homecoming.

It flashed from its Bird-Nest Float,
the prize of some parent
who worked it into the Weave of Hope
for its ghastly nestlings.

Now, even trees carry the Weight
of Our Litter, the shiny airtight packages
of manufactured fresh-ness, ant-and-roach-proof-ness,
the Brand Names, the One-Time-Use-Ness
— or was it Use-Less? — the Ad-ness, the Mad-Ness
of plastics

we find in root-clumps, frond-tufts,
in the craws of squawking land- and seabirds,
microbits in the green guts of our
Catch of the Day

which we sample
from our Styrofoam Plates
below the tree’s Flashy Candy Wrapper.