An unexpected poem

 One of my favorite-ever stories of "research from unexpected places" is the Friendly Floatees story.

In short: in 1992, a storm led to several shipping containers being washed off the container ship into the Pacific and breaking open. These containers held packages of bath toys - ducks, turtles, and whales, I think, were the ones in that shipment. The cardboard they were attached to quickly disintegrated, but because the toys were made to float (and in fact, keep floating - they had no holes to take on water), they started washing up on beaches. Curtis Ebbesmeyer, an oceanographer, heard about this, and since it could be pinpointed where they went overboard, he used data from when and where they washed up to track currents. (There are other objects that go off the sides of ships - I've also read of people finding Lego bits on Welsh beaches)

I dunno. Yeah, "more plastic in the ocean bad" but also, it's just kind of a cool story, I reference it in Ecology when I talk about the ocean circulation patterns.

Well, today, I learned that Kei Miller, a poet, wrote a poem about it. (But not JUST about rubber ducks, I think, as you'll see when you read the poem:)

When considering the long, long journey of 28,000 rubber ducks

Kei Miller

To them who knew to break free from dark hold of ships

who trusted their unsqueezed bodies instead to the Atlantic;

to them who scorned the limits of bathtubs,

refused to join a chorus of rub-a-dub;

to them who've always known their own high tunes,

hitched rides on the manacled backs of blues,

who've been sailing now since 1992; to them

that pass in squeakless silence over the Titanic,

float in and out of salty vortexes; to them

who grace the shores of hot and frozen continents,

who instruct us yearly on the movement of currents;

to those bright yellow dots that crest the waves

like spots of praise: hail.

 

I love that and now I want to track down a copy of Miller's "The Cartographer Tries to Map a Way to Zion" that the poem was published in.