Containerized Economies

It’s not so recent, despite
How overwhelming it’s been
Recently, what with plastics

And shipping calculations
For making packages stack.
In a sense, every pit house

Was a scooped-out container,
While various entrails, gourds,
Hides, and skulls served for pouches,

But that’s only cultural.
It’s fair to say life itself
Began as a container

Or soon needed containment
To shelter its reversals
Of entropy locally

And separate resources
From waste. It just that, maybe,
You’re the greatest since corals

Or even stromatolites
At creating containers
Themselves as principal waste.

Already bacteria
And photic-zone sea creatures
Are colonizing the heaps

You don’t know what to do with,
And plastics keep turning up
In the guts of lightless deeps.

There’ll be new economies.
Pray they depend on humans
To generate containers.