Atlandtis
Saratoga, CA
2022, Senior, Poetry & Spoken Word
mother, tell me a story.
once when black cliffs shattered the sea & sprayed pearls crab-people walked upon the earth; scuttling across sand the same bronze as their skin & drinking milk from shells. they paddled the waves with their long crab legs, no fins or webs or gills to guide them.
were they like us?
they were not so flat & moon-like & were wholly unsuited for the sea; they breathed clouds not salt but were more than us: builders & inventors & gods of their world, wrenching mother earth open and gorging on the treasures she once held. stones illuminated like small moons and more golden than the sun, forests of coral as orange & pink & yellow as a thousand dawns. this was how they ruled: sculpting towers of icy marble, veins stretching for the sky; raising shimmering prisms as blue as the bay and twice as wide; plundering every living creature’s teeth & skin & donning them as trophies while the red sun swelled. how the world changed under their reign! how the heavens blossomed flame & leached soil of its brimming brown, how fragments of ocean splintered into foam, hurricanes spinning rage. how they staked the earth & pulled pulled pulled until she had no more left to give.
and then?
and then? and then? no one knows. they simply left the world behind. mother earth took her vengeance & dragged their glory back into her core. the only remnant remaining was her rage, volatile as the waters we call home. she sent storms to reclaim her lands & buried all traces of the crab-people under a thousand layers of dirt & stone & saltwater.
dear daughter, this is the tale of why this world is smothered in sea, why there are mountains under our fins, why the sky is eternally scarlet. remember, remember the crab-people and the empires they wrought—
mother?
yes?
it’s just a myth, isn’t it?
as far as we know, daughter, as far as we know.
Reflection
Reflection
While I was thinking about floods in coastal cities and islands as a result of climate change, my mind went to the story of Atlantis. It is a myth about a kingdom entirely underwater with superior technology and riches beyond imagination. Today, we talk about Atlantis as something unreal, something that may have existed in the past, but something we have long decided is a far-fetched story. Similarly, I was inspired to write a poem in which our world is an "Atlantis." I wrote about a world in which humans have evolved to live underwater and regard a time humans lived on land as fiction. The poem is a sort of myth explaining how the world came to be submerged as a result of humans and climate change. While writing this, I did feel very regretful of humanity's actions towards such a precious resource as the earth. However, I tried to make the poem humorous by describing humans as an alien, "crab-like" animal. I feel like writing, especially poetry, can be such a powerful medium to convey messages, and I hope that people can realize the long-term implications of climate change when they read my poem.