Poems by Margaret DeRitter

For Toms River and All the Poisoned Places

by Margaret DeRitter

From Canary Winter 2021-22

Margaret grew up in New Jersey’s Passaic River Watershed but also spent many summer days near Toms River. She now lives in Michigan’s Kalamazoo River Valley and has paddled many of the state’s rivers and lakes. She also once walked across the Mackinac Bridge, which spans the Mackinac Straits and connects Michigan’s Upper and Lower peninsulas.

This town I passed through all those teenage years ago,
heading to the pristine sands of Island Beach State Park,
the lemonade stands and pizza joints of Seaside Heights.

Never knew pollutants were running through the river,
piping to the ocean, seeping into sandy soil
as metal drums kept rusting underground.

Waste from Ciba-Geigy’s dyes. The price of profits
children’s cancers—brain tumors, leukemia.
No one cared but parents of the stricken kids.

'Til a nurse in Philly noticed all the same hometowns.
And still the years rolled by, the plume kept moving,
city wells kept pumping poison through people’s taps.

Taps. Let us play Taps for the children of Toms River
who never made it to adulthood, who suffered
for the sins of government and Ciba profiteers.

Play it for the kids of Flint, poisoned too by penny-pinching
bureaucrats. For the PFAS drinkers all across the state
of Michigan, sucking down that lethal brew.

Play it for the trout and turtles of the Kalamazoo,
hit first by PCBs from paper mills, then by tar sands oil
from the country’s largest inland spill.

Let us play Taps for all the ruined rivers, all the dying
lakes. But please, God, not for the Mackinac Straits.
Let us shut down that pipeline before it’s too late.