The river is polluted
The skies are grey in falling night
The stars are hidden from our sight
Constellations convoluted

Bilge water and bile
Corrupted hearts so vile
Defile of a sacred form
This is not divine
Only desecration

The river is polluted
The seeds we plant do not survive
And even life is doomed to die
The trees are all uprooted

          We want the leaves
          We want the flowers
          We want the scent of the forest

The river is polluted
Our dismay is all man-made
Unwholesome branch that holds no shade
Our hope for shelter all eluted

Brackish is the water
Swim if you care to drown
We take giant gulps
Deluded with hope
And still we die of thirst

I caught a tremendous fish
and held him beside the boat
half out of water, with my hook
fast in a corner of his mouth.
He didn't fight.
He hadn't fought at all.
He hung a grunting weight,
battered and venerable
and homely.  Here and there
his brown skin hung in strips
like ancient wallpaper,
and its pattern of darker brown
was like wallpaper:
shapes like full-blown roses
stained and lost through age.
He was speckled with barnacles,
fine rosettes of lime,
and infested
with tiny white sea-lice,
and underneath two or three
rags of green **** hung down.
While his gills were breathing in
the terrible oxygen
--the frightening gills,
fresh and crisp with blood,
that can cut so badly--
I thought of the coarse white flesh
packed in like feathers,
the big bones and the little bones,
the dramatic reds and blacks
of his shiny entrails,
and the pink swim-bladder
like a big peony.
I looked into his eyes
which were far larger than mine
but shallower, and yellowed,
the irises backed and packed
with tarnished tinfoil
seen through the lenses
of old scratched isinglass.
They shifted a little, but not
to return my stare.
--It was more like the tipping
of an object toward the light.
I admired his sullen face,
the mechanism of his jaw,
and then I saw
that from his lower lip
--if you could call it a lip
grim, wet, and weaponlike,
hung five old pieces of fish-line,
or four and a wire leader
with the swivel still attached,
with all their five big hooks
grown firmly in his mouth.
A green line, frayed at the end
where he broke it, two heavier lines,
and a fine black thread
still crimped from the strain and snap
when it broke and he got away.
Like medals with their ribbons
frayed and wavering,
a five-haired beard of wisdom
trailing from his aching jaw.
I stared and stared
and victory filled up
the little rented boat,
from the pool of bilge
where oil had spread a rainbow
around the rusted engine
to the bailer rusted orange,
the sun-cracked thwarts,
the oarlocks on their strings,
the gunnels--until everything
was rainbow, rainbow, rainbow!
And I let the fish go.

Here
Is a timely
Noun to consider
From the Merriam-Webster page.

"Trumpery."

Note (at bottom) the list of near-antonyms;
what is the opposite of trumpery?

[Popularity: Bottom 40% of words]

trumpery
noun trum·pery \ˈtrəm-p(ə-)rē\

Definition of trumpery

1
a : worthless nonsense b : trivial or useless articles : junk <a wagon loaded with household trumpery — Washington Irving>

2
archaic : ****** finery

Origin of trumpery

Middle English (Scots) trompery deceit, from Middle French, from tromper to deceive

First Known Use: 15th century

Examples of trumpery

<claims for weight-loss products that are based much more on Madison-Avenue trumpery than on bariatric science>

Related to trumpery

Synonyms
applesauce [slang], balderdash, baloney (also boloney), beans, bilge, blah (also blah-blah), blarney, blather, blatherskite, blither, bosh, bull [slang], bunk, bunkum (or *******), claptrap, codswallop [British], crapola [slang], crock, drivel, drool, fiddle, fiddle-faddle, fiddlesticks, flannel [British], flapdoodle, folderol (also falderal), folly, foolishness, fudge, garbage, guff, hogwash, hokeypokey, hokum, hoodoo, hooey, horsefeathers [slang], humbug, humbuggery, jazz, malarkey (also malarky), moonshine, muck, nerts [slang], nuts, piffle, poppycock, punk, rot, *******, senselessness, silliness, slush, stupidity, taradiddle (or tarradiddle), tommyrot, tosh, trash, nonsense, twaddle

Related Words
absurdity, asininity, fatuity, foolery, idiocy, imbecility, inaneness, inanity, insanity, kookiness, lunacy; absurdness, craziness, madness, senselessness, witlessness; hoity-toity, monkey business, monkeyshine(s), shenanigan(s), tomfoolery; gas, hot air, rigmarole (also rigamarole); double-talk, greek, hocus-pocus

Near Antonyms
levelheadedness, rationality, reasonability, reasonableness, sensibleness; common sense, horse sense, sense; discernment, judgment (or judgement), wisdom
By: Robinson Bolkum