Aqua Contemplations
Chicago, IL
2021, Senior, Poetry & Spoken Word
I walk through watery depths every day
Or at least the air is full of rain
Humidity clings to me like pain
Water both builds me and makes me restrained
Waters rise while icebergs fall
The beaches erode, first one then all
Life thrives in fever heat
And floods come to wet my feet
Waters rise and my hopes fall
Nobody seems to do anything at all
Teenagers pant and sob and plead
And little is done to impede
The endless tide of greenhouse gas
That will end in our tragic death
We curse our leaders and the system
Ineffectively, because they don’t listen
Mirror, mirror, on the wall
Who is the most beautiful of them all?
It whispers like a shell pressed to your ear
That only the attentive can hear
“People can be deadly pretty
They burn coal and build their cities
But the best of everything and all
Is every single drop of water that falls”
And this knowledge clings to me like barnacles
But nobody else seems to know
Mirror, mirror, beloved by sea
What wisdom do you have for me?
“The most vulnerable will be hurt first
And first world countries will say ‘this is the worst’
But we need the leadership of science
And carefully applied defiance
To change the change that grips our climate”
I walk through the pouring rain
As umbrellas wave like jellyfish
Holding all my heavy knowledge
And yet a wary hope, a wish
That we will save the planet
Reflection
My work was inspired by the fact that the future looks very bleak sometimes, and I have to make the choice to believe that efforts to help stop climate change (both mine and others) will help. This strange juxtaposition of despair and hope is what I tried to capture by having a poem reminiscent of the stream of consciousness. What I’ve come to understand through this work and other things that I’ve done is that you have to fight to try to end climate change and other environmental disasters and inequities, and this can be done in very small and very big ways as you confront this strange, beautiful, terrible world. I personally turned vegetarian and work with my local aquarium in conservation activities because of my conviction on the importance of water. I also look for more resources to learn from because I’m in a time of my life before I can vote or exercise significant buying power, but these limitations on my influence won’t last forever, and I need to be ready to use them to their full ability when they do come to me.