Ocean’s Death
Vancouver, British Columbia, Canada
2016, Junior, Poetry & Spoken Word
At the beginning God created the heavens and the earth,
The earth was formless, hollow and empty,
So the light was created, glowing with pride in itself,
As was the expanse, so clear and unapproachable,
But on the third day, she was born and brought to the earth,
God’s prettiest daughter, world’s greatest gift,
Ocean, so beautiful, so generous.
Her blue dress and hair look so clean and pure,
Without a twinge of dust or dirt in her smile.
Life was brought to earth, she fed them and bathed them,
She held them in her arms, gave them warmth and life,
Like a mother, she gently took care of everything in the world.
She took desperate tears and brought them into the sky,
Then hope came down as sweet rain drops,
Rain runs into the soil and turned into rivers that feed everything,
She always took what was wasted and gave what was needed.
When the children of Adam and Eve asked for more and more from her,
She gave everything she had with a gentle smile.
Years flowed by, Decades rushed away, generations went and gone,
She gave out all she could give, everything she had,
People thanked her when she gave, cursed her when she took,
And with that they took more and more from her,
And what they don’t even need for food,
They took it and exchange for some colorful paper
that they found valuable and could do anything for.
She knows it, she knows it all, but she still gives,
She still gave it to them generously and hide the pain by her own.
They invent a devil, dug deep from the fiery chasms of earth,It have a black gold skin.
It can bring them a ton of those valuable colorful papers
Again she opens her arms for it, She will take it if it can make them happy,
But once she touches it, it burns her skin and breaks her bones into cracks.
They are pouring it on her,burning her, no matter how she cries and begs.
She is dying quickly, she roars in pain,
Her dress turns red, colored by the blood
of the other lives that she also protected .
How can they be so cruel? Why are they so violent?
Years and years, they pour it on her, letting the devil bite her,
It tears her skin open, it burns her blood,
Her beauty is gone forever, she howles desperately
huge cracks of wound opens on her body in ugly black colors,
In some places of her, the skin was gone even the muscles were broken,
The bones crack from inside into small pieces of rock.
She cried : oh father, why do they do this? What did I do wrong?
I feed them, I grow them, I give everything I have to them,
Why do they hurt me, why do they ruin me, why, why, why do they kill me…
Everything was dying, everything she loved,
Everything she cared about, dies in the warm home she made for them,
In her arms, one by one, slowly, in her broken arms,
She laughs desperately, what can she do? She is dying too.
Her arms are no longer warm, the houses for them are no longer safe.
There is no even one piece of her is pure or clean anymore,
She is weak, hollow and have holes all over her.
But they are still pouring the devil on her,
Burning the broken scars over agin and agin.
She closes her eyes and grants herself a long, last dream,
She is back into the days when she still was beautiful
She took everyone in her arms, She fed them with plenty of food,
She watched the children laugh and thank her,
She watched fishes swim and hide and seek in the house she gave them,
She watches herself smile gently and…
She wakes, funny how dreams seem not so far away
But can never be gone back into it.
She says to herself: Curse them your blood and body,give it back to them…
Then one day, she was gone, gone forever.
No one knows about her, or tells about her anymore,
people will wonder at a small pond of black water:
Is that what they use to call ocean?
And not after so long, they will be gone too,
They eat the fruit they plant by them self,
Every piece of water in them are from her,
No wonder why or how they would be gone.
Reflection
When I heard of this first considred human impacts on the environment, I am not interested in going into this topic not because I am selfish or lazy, it is simply because I cannot help and reading more about disasters just disappoint me more. I don’t have a voice that is loud enough to be heard or to be taken seriously. Finnly, through, an opportunity to say something, to tell a little poem or something so someone could hear me or listen to me. Again I could not raise my pen, as heavy as stone inside my heart, could not write somthing full of hope or justice; who am I to blame others about the oil that went into the ocean? I still use a car as often as everyone else.How can I write out something to lame others while the oil that kills the ocean is mine too? I felt disgraceful; I knew everything about how the oil came into the sea but felt trapped in my life as a 21th centry person who use gasoline and a car. But I still want to write, I still want to write something down, using what I know, using what I saw, using what I usually hide away because of shame; I am not going to hide from it or run away with it; it is not a joke, it is a future, our future. We need to face it.