All Water Leads to the Ocean
Columbia, SC
2020, Senior, Poetry & Spoken Word
Driving to school in the mornings,
I think I love a vanishing world on the freeway. I am 17. You have
a navy sedan. I fill it up after it gurgles
gas, which is often. Next to a billboard advertising the next
permutation of a gas station is the flag, big enough
to cover the oil spots on the freeway, seeping into the ground, the
ocean. You pass the old plastics factory with decrepit
corrugated metal walls, which is to say decrepit and old
are generous words, as exhaust from the station wagon
in front of us clouds the FM radio, and we drive down
the freeway to school and back so much that I think
my lips are plastic. My veins, carrying natural gas.
There are mornings when the freeway seems open,
empty, a menagerie of its own, but each time
I’m looking for the word for when you’re driving me
silently, but tense, fingers tapping the glass window
in a mechanical beat, eyes set straight on the road, as if
you have blinders, because you have an extra shift,
a chemistry test. The horizon disappears and reappears
like a blinking stoplight under the billows of smoke.
///
This morning, I take my creamed coffee
on my front steps to watch the sun bleed across the sky.
You aren’t there yet. I imagine you arriving
at my house in a tandem bike, painted shiny blue
with flecks of gold and an air horn, in an electric car
that purrs and whistles, with a chassis that looks like
a folded-up piece of paper, or in a bus, train, subway
car the colors of a monarch butterfly, a plum, a soft pear,
with people inside I know by name, and we’ll drive
down asphalt that hums and murmurs and maybe powers
the oven and toilets at home. Although today
you still come to my house in that blur of navy & rubber
wheels burnt on the pavement, I am working,
I am writing, I am singing, calling, running, living
for that day when we’ll watch the puddles of not oil
but rainwater on the highway glowing in dappled strokes
of morning sunlight, just like the ocean a hundred miles away must
shine.
Reflection
Reflection
Like the narrator of this poem, I have to drive to my school each morning in a hybrid car, which is partially powered by gasoline, and pass many of the landmarks they mention—oil spots on the highway; small, dried-up streams; and an abandoned factory. These landmarks are disheartening, and a clear sign of climate change and our role in causing it. (The oil left on the highways I drive on will eventually lead to the ocean, for example, and pollute the ocean). However, in the second part of my poem, my message to readers is that our everyday, our normal, can change. With each new day, we remake the world in the way that we wish to see it. Through my research on transportation, and ways to transform the climate crisis (which is caused in large part by vehicle emissions) into hope, I read about alternatives to single-person gasoline-powered cars like mass transportation, electric cars, walking, biking, etc., that can eliminate or reduce the use of gasoline/oil in transportation. What brings me hope is that there is always something that one can do—be it activism through art, innovation, engineering, petitioning, calling, etc.—to advocate for climate-friendly transportation and a sustainable tomorrow.