For Now . . .
Vancouver, Washington
2016, Junior, Poetry & Spoken Word
I am the Ocean.
I am water.
I am most of this planet.
I sketched it.
Every cloud, every stream, and every raindrop,
It all comes back,
To Me.
I am the constant.
My cycle is eternal.
One way or another,
Every living thing here
Needs me.
I am the source.
I am what they crawled out of.
I am life.
And humans?
Humans are no different.
I don’t owe them a thing.
I give.
They take.
But I can always take back.
That’s just the way it’s always been.
It’s not their planet anyway.
Never was.
Never will be.
But humans . . .
They take more than their share.
They poison me,
Yet they expect me to feed them.
They heat me up,
My lungs: my coral reefs.
Destroyed.
It protected them from my wrath.
To which they tore apart with dynamite,
Reciprocated with cyanine.
Tendrils of darkness invade me.
Oil suffocates me.
It seeps into my very essence,
As I bathe in the rainbow.
A rainbow of petro and shame.
Nuclear waste riddles me.
You bombard me with your trash,
Your radioactive trash.
Like they say, I guess.
In the depths of my depths,
Out of sight, out of mind.
Sewage and Runoff tarnishes me.
Acid burns me.
I am plagued.
Plagued by these humans.
I am raging.
I slam; I pound. I lash; I tumble.
But I am choking.
I will not be a dead sea.
I refuse to be a dead sea.
I have not crashed and broken.
I rise,
I fall.
And I rise once more.
I will always rise once more.
If humans want to exist in nature with me,
And off of me,
I must be kept healthy,
Or humans won’t survive.
Simple as that.
I could do with or without humans.
I am the Ocean.
I am the sea.
There is an entire world,
Inside of me.
I covered this entire planet once,
I could always do it again.
I don’t need people.
People need me.
Reflection
In the United States, we have freedom of speech. Everyone has a voice for a reason: to stand up for yourself, and fight for what you deserve. The Ocean doesn’t have that voice, seemingly quiet and alone in its fathomless depths. At this time, I speak not for myself, but for the Ocean without voice, for her right to live in peace, her right to be treated with dignity. The Ocean is a living being, just like you and me; a living being who is being oppressed, treated like she doesn’t matter, when in reality, she controls our very ends and beginnings.
When I wrote my poem, I wanted people to understand the drastic impacts their actions have on the ocean, to realize what we have started, and to take the first steps in undoing this wrong. We are all interconnected and interdependent, the ocean, you, and me. My wish is that others might see what I see when I look out at the Ocean; to not only have hope, but faith. Faith that we as a society will stand up to protect the ocean, and save it from what it has become.