Take it Home

There is litter in the verges,
there is litter in the hedges,
there is litter in the forests
there is litter on the beaches.

Take your litter home with you,
put it in a bin;
leaving litter everywhere
is an awful sin.

Takeaway wrappers on the kerb,
thrown from passing traffic,
fester with discarded vapes –
it’s almost pornographic.

Take your litter home with you,
put it in a bin;
leaving litter everywhere
is an awful sin.

I’ve seen a dirty nappy hurled 
from the window of a car
as it hurtled along the motorway –
it didn’t go very far.

Take your litter home with you,
put it in a bin;
leaving litter everywhere
is an awful sin.

Kim M. Russell, 17th August 2023

Image by Brian Yurasits on Unsplash

It’s Thursday and at the dVerse Poets Pub we are meeting the bar with rhetorical devices. Björn is our host; he tells us that he has started to look at rhetorical devices in language and has found that a lot of the tools are the same as for poetic devices. He reminds us that “rhetoric is the art of convincing and we find examples of this art all around us”.

He says that we have used many of the devices before: repetition, metaphor, alliteration, internal rhymes etc. whereas we may use others less, such as hyperbole and allusion. But there has to be a cause for convincing: political, to sell something, to convince a teenager to clean their room, for example.

Björn has provided some useful links for reference and to help us write persuasive poems in any form, including prose poetry that focuses on rhetorical devices.

35 thoughts on “Take it Home”

  1. Whenever I see a dirty diaper somewhere it isn’t supposed to be, I want to throw up. Although, all litter is awful. Your poem supports the disgust with which we ought to all view leaving trash all over the place.

    Especially liked the line “it’s almost pornographic”. Agreed.

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      1. You had me convinced already as I assumed it was real. I’m glad it missed you, just not that someone threw it out in the first place. I see them in parking lots, recently at the beach someone left one on the sidewalk by beach access. There were trash cans?!?🤦🏻‍♀️

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  8. I won’t take any convincing to go along with that, Kim. Humans are a filthy species that doesn’t care where it leaves its waste. When I drive along and see what others have tossed from their car windows, or walk on the beach to see innumerable cigarette filters, it makes me both disgusted and nauseous.

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  12. Yes, I am with you. I hate seeing litter everywhere it doesn’t take much to put it in a bin. My son actually asks his kids to always pick up some rubbish that has been left around when they leave a place. It’s something we used to do when he was little especially when out at the beaches.

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    1. Thanks for reading and commenting, When my daughter was little I gave her a bag to put her rubbish in to put in a bin or, if there wasn’t one, to take home to put in the bin. She does that now with her five year old. If only everyone adopted that attitude, the world would be a better place.

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