A Letter in a Crisis, From a Crisis
Chennai, India
2020, Junior, Poetry & Spoken Word
Dear Humans,
Some of you know me, some of you ignore me
and some of you refuse to believe I am here.
As the golden warm sand embraces your feet,
you look beyond the horizon where the sky swallows the sea
and you marvel at the wonders around you.
Little do you know that the seashells you are skipping over,
like broken shards of painted glass, came from an ocean
that is also broken. Yet your eyes always wander past it as you walk along the shores, always
wondering about the future, ignoring the now, even though it needs you more than ever.
The roar of the waves that you relish is the scream of an aching mother, the salty spray that
caresses your faces is her tears of desperation, the wind that stops you in your steps is her
wanting you to turn around and look at the stubborn footprints that you have left behind. Your
smoky exhales have riddled her surfaces with invisible ripples of scars that you know to be there.
Her waters, whether they are shallow, turquoise pools of delight that bask in the
sunbeams that hit her floors or deep, an ambrosial hue of darker than dark blue,
are murdering her children in their sleep.
It was never her fault, never something that she did. It was always you.
And yet you wonder why she turns merciless and unrelenting when she takes
away your homes in sheer agony. You do not realise that your homes
are compensation, a consolation, a solatium for the vast, glacial
homes of all the other innocent beings that she has been forced to take away. And yet
you continue to smoke your cigarettes that scrape the skies, not realising, not understanding
the heart-wrenching fact that she is the one who is swallowing your smoke, strangling herself
so that you don’t choke, turning her boundless, ethereal waters into an agitated urn of acid
that burns her children and buries their ashes where you can never hope to see them.
You do not realise that the same wind that whistles in your ears,
the same winds that are turning warmer, are her mournful cries, begging you, urging you to
open your eyes to her plight. Her waters have begun to inch towards you, rising slowly but
deliberately, not listening to her anymore. But she does not think you are hopeless, no. For if
she did, by this age of suffering, her wrinkled but adroit expanses would have engulfed you,
leaving earth to be more ocean than planet. She believes in you.
And I have crept up on you to remind you of that. I am your waking call.
Yes, the ocean is infinite and riotous, but she is fragile and much too silent.
You have caused me to be born in your beautiful, broken world. I am your doing.
That is the cold, hard truth. But I am not finished yet. So, seize the reins of your planet back
from me. I tell you, do not disenchant the ocean of your charms.
Your planet will rise once again if you believe as much as she does in you.
Yours hopefully,
The Climate Crisis
Reflection
Reflection
The climate crisis has been a significant part of my life for the past couple of years, and climate action is a cause that’s extremely close to my heart. But I realise now that I’ve always thought of the problem as too gargantuan a monster to tackle, almost never believing that I could do anything more than a small part to help. This poem was one of those stories swirling around in my head that finally had a chance to come out into the open, because now is a time when we need people to speak up more than ever. While writing this poem, I realised that not a lot of people, including past me, understand that climate change is not just affecting our atmosphere; that in fact, the oceans are the one bearing the full brunt force of it. This is a pressing issue that too many people are unaware of, and unfortunately, there are so many people who don’t even believe in climate change, much less the harm it’s inflicting on the oceans, considering it all a "hoax" and a "scam." This poem is all about that first step: recognizing climate change, doing our best to understand it and most importanty, believing that it is very much happening. But it also talks about hope and how our planet’s future depends on our willingness to act.