Perspectives
Portland, ME
2017, Junior, Poetry & Spoken Word
A Poem in Three Parts
1. Plastic Jellyfish
I swim in the cool water
Twist through the waves
Small fish jump along
My hard patterned shell
Blooms of jellyfish
Drift within turgid waves
Semi-Buoyant companions
Agile in the ocean’s fluid movements
They taunt me
Two long tentacles waving down
I go in for a snack
An easy catch with no reaction
Stuck around my beak
Suddenly tasteless in my mouth
I try to swallow
Choking on the foe
No longer a weightless delight
It swells inside of me
What could this be
Where did it come from
The imitation jellyfish catches
Blocking my air
My flippers thrash
I struggle for my last breath
2. Changing Water
A bucket of water
From the vast ocean
Spread out before me
Bright in the suns rays
Have you been
to the warm and peaceful Pacific,
Shaped a vibrant coral reef—
A colossal hotel for underwater playmates?
Indeed you carried sweeps of oil
through the pleasant water
Over the bright coral reefs
you so carefully created
Have you clung to a leaf after
a warm midsummer rain,
Dripped down the stalk
Landing in the soft dirt?
The rain that fell picks up residue
on its way to the ocean
A running stream of plastic
To a patch that never ends
Did you go to the icy arctic
during a cold winter,
Break off a glacier
Now dancing with the boats?
The frigid air just cold enough
to keep the toxins you carried along
together and alive
for longer than tepid
Streaked with lurid brush strokes
that cover the life beneath you
An illusion for the devastation
that no one can see
You continue your rhythmic waves
Even though you’re stained with oil
A choice you can’t make but is made
for you by human apathy
Inhabitants of the coast
Drinking this water
May not live
If we don’t help
3. A Dying Ocean
I am a body,
diagnosed
with humanity.
My arteries clogged with runoff oil,
a shooting pain with each tide.
The children I am home to
drift away from me,
wash up on shore in cloaks of black gold.
Mouths agape,
they float off with no farewell.
My skin is glossed over with
a polished rainbow.
A mirror of unctuous specters
reflects off the oily seas.
A sign of my suffering,
paint across my canvas.
Ships plunge through me
leaving a snail trail
the pernicious residue undulating
through the clean current
Drudging toward healthy fish,
clean blue seas
and unsoiled birds.
I am a body
suffering through a world
you have created
So many cures for my sickness
that you will not give
Please believe in me
and the things you have done
I am the only ocean you have
Stop forcing me down the drain
Reflection
Reflection
The purpose of my collection of perspective poems was to show people the effect of pollution from different points of view. I feel that it is very important to show how the ocean might feel about pollution, and using poetry to write this would be very powerful in showing the emotion. One thing that really caught my attention when I was deciding on some topics, was that animals eat the plastic thinking it’s food. One of the worst cases is with sea turtles eating plastic bags thinking they’re jellyfish. I also thought it would be important to approach what most people don’t think about when drinking water. I wanted to somehow give the water an identity, I asked myself questions about where the water had been and then applied information about the oil and trash it now carries. For my last poem I added irony by implying that the ocean was a body diagnosed with humanity; in reality humanity is supposed to be a good thing, but now we are making it into a bad thing. We need to figure out how to stop being the sickness and start being the cure.