The Green Monster
Midlothian, VA
2017, Senior, Poetry & Spoken Word
I used to watch the minnows grow up in the nursery of my lawn
Eggs turned tadpoles turned frogs turned mothers
An ecosystem everyone else learned from textbooks, but I did not
I saw every stage creep its way through the warm summer days
But when the blooms came, I learned that the fish could live here no more
To a fish, every bloom is a tomb
The life of another is synonymous with their own death
But I am still too 7-year-old young to know this
Despite all of this green, I am growing up in a graveyard
I, a young scientist with a creek in her backyard
Studied this phenomenon long before my 12-year-old tongue had a name for it
Without understanding what it was, I knew it was toxic
The way the fertilizer snakes through the grass screamed danger
Too afraid to touch it, I used a stick to stir the thick green witch’s brew in my Eden,
Not a poison apple, but a poisoned plant all the same
I watched my research become choked out of existence
By this green monster, still full of life
In 9th grade, I captured the green monster,
Brought in into my house in glass mason jar cages and tried to understand it,
Turned in my naivety for a research project
Measured out fertilizers and studied exactly how the water died
Learned that “organic” doesn’t mean it will protect the waters
Called my data science fair and sent it off to competitions to have it sent back
The rejection stung for years but I realize now that the research wasn’t meant for them
It was my first test, the world ready to train me to defend it
I have called it the green monster, but like most monsters it has many names
Media has named it “algal blooms” and science knows it as hypoxia
This is how the monster works:
The fertilizer turns the algae to a monster and then it dies
Sucking up all the oxygen, leaving the rest of the life in their habitats breathless
Even now, I am still learning how to fight the monster
How to make weapons out of knowledge,
Not a speck of fertilizer has touched my lawn in three years
And the creek in my backyard runs clear every day of the year now
A small change, but the world to everything that breathes that water
No longer a tomb, but a nursery to everything I catch in my nets