What Shel Silverstein's Poem Really Means

I sat crosslegged, in a way we used to call Indian Style but is now called "Criss crossed apple sauce", and my teacher read to be from a black and white book called Where the Sidewalk Ends. She read a poem called Sarah Cynthia Silvia Stout by Shell Silverstein. I loved the comments about all the trash, and how this kid refused to do what she was suppose to. All the kids loved it, but then the poem turns. It turns into a nasty situation. The poor girl waits too long to take out the trash, and then she and the entire United States gets covered with the trash. We all laughed and it was a great poem. My teacher turned the page, and we went tot he next poem.

Shel Silverstein though once said,"I have never written anything without a purpose. Everything I write is to say something." When they asked him about "Sarah Cynthia Sylvia Stout" he said,"Now that one has a definite meaning we should all pay attention to, since we all live in this house together." (A boy named shell, 1988) What house is Shell talking about? Yes, he's talking about the earth. This poem is a very strong didactic poem that fits wonderfully for our era and situation right now. We need to take care of the earth.

When you take out the trash this week, take into consideration how much that weighs. Let;s say it weighs 30lbs. That's one family one week, 30lbs. There's about 200 million families in this country, and that means each person is throwing away approximately 30 lbs of trash a week. in one week the country's families throw out 9000000000 lbs of garbage a week. You can do the math to multiply that number by 52(the number of weeks in a year). Where does all of that garbage go? It's not all recycled, even though we'd love it to be. No, it becomes a landfill and then they cover it with dirt. After they cover it with dirt they put more trash on it, and then cover it with dirt again until there's a mountain. They put grass on the mountain and move the landfill somewhere else.

Shell is pointing out how we are the little girl. We, everyone in the country, are the little girl who doesn't want to take out the trash. We don't want to mess with this situation, we don't want to accept that there is no place to put this trash. A very large reminder of this way of thinking, was in the 80's when there was a barge of trash that didn't have a home. New jersey didn't want it and New York didn't want it, so it traveled around the Hudson till someone claimed it. We don't like to deal with the gross and yucky stuff. So we let it grow and grow and grow. Our landfills have reached record sizes and capacities, and still there are far too few people recycling. Shel is saying that if we don't do something, we will be taken over by our own trash because it will be too late. Or we can just build houses on those landfills.