As Darkness Spreads
Rockaway, NJ
2016, Senior, Poetry & Spoken Word
2010
In the Gulf brown pelicans don’t know how
to fly towards light. Everything is the same.
Everything is dripping with slick.
A mother is bound with black chains and
swallowed by fire. She combusts
and coagulates until she is left barren.
The rest of the world sunbathes with
strawberry daiquiris on sooty beaches,
avert their eyes as the mother is scrubbed
and bathed until she is crude, exposed.
Soon she is abandoned. Soon she is
consumed relentlessly by the black.
The sludge is Pandora’s release, fifty
different shades of suffocation. The fishing
nets choke up glass, gasping of contamination.
For hundreds of years the ghosts rise, scratchy
voices pleading foul, calling for change.
They find silence. Our guilt long gone.
2016
The fallout ruins without pause –
summer is severed short by our past
carelessness. The sea is the sea is the sea.
We do not realize we are splashing in oil slick, do not see
the baby dolphin battered against shore. Life
unable to hold on. In the ocean, children find
water without fish, a cold gulf floor
stripped of coral. The sea erasing itself,
and no one remembering why.
Reflection
Reflection
The purpose of this poem is to increase awareness about oil spills, specifically major ones. Although large-scale accidents, like the 2010 Deepwater Horizon oil spill, receive major attention at first, they are soon forgotten as other events divert the public’s interest. I wrote this poem to encourage readers to be mindful that these accidents – and human actions (or lack thereof) – can add up over time. Using the metaphor of the mother as the ocean that is slowly ruined by oil spills, as well as creating a dark and somber mood, I develop the idea that despite how important oceans are to the Earth and humans, we often fail to fix and quickly forget about oil spills, which takes the ocean hundreds of years to recover from. We need to stop abandoning and forgetting our past, and instead do our best to remedy our mistakes. Likewise, I emphasize that these spills, which many people may think won’t affect them since they live far away, can have far-reaching effects on humanity, beaches, and animals as well. Only by collective human effort to raise awareness and affect change can we improve the health of our oceans.