Aubade by the Sea
Pleasanton, CA
2020, Senior, Poetry & Spoken Word
Of the stories I know, I will tell you only this one:
the fishermen by the shoreline, swimming past
washed-out stars. The turtles & sunfish choking
underneath a speckled sky. This is Atlantis
after it folds into the water’s pleats: a gull
caught in teeth of twine, nets coiled like pearls,
sinking slow & soundless below the horizon.
I loved the sea once. I loved the still-young salmon,
the brilliant coral, the halcyon glow of eternity
in my yearning mouth. Back then, they called
this ravage divine punishment. Now, there are
no gods here, only the strange dissonance of plastic bags
and the graceless death of faraway ice. The day is so still.
Wreaths in our gutted hands. My love,
what I know of despair is bones & carcasses washed ashore
in whorls of ashy foam; what I know of despair is
its many faces, its animal jaws splitting the sea into
jagged stones & leaving behind an economy of fuel.
Watch: the tropical cyclones & then the coral, blanched.
My love, you will be born into a world bereft
of breath. Bright dead things with no salvation. What if
I am trying to make this livable. Please—
I am still young. We can flood the streets
with cries for change, demand accountability
for these man-made scars, choose the dawning
of a newer day. I never said it was easy.
But this is what it means to live: trembling, wide-eyed,
brave. Can you see it? The whales returning.
The ocean’s pale heart.
Works Cited
https://thecorrespondent.com/214/in-2030-we-ended-the-climate-emergency-heres-how/28330740746-6b15af77
https://psmag.com/environment/young-activists-offer-their-climate-demands-at-cop24
Reflection
Living in the Bay Area, much of my life has revolved around the ocean. When I was young, my parents would take me and my sister for day trips to the beach, and I thought nothing could be more gorgeous. Since then, I’ve become aware of the San Francisco Bay’s legacy of pollution, and how, even though legislation has been passed preventing polluters and contaminants from entering the Bay, chemicals are still entering the water through stormwater and wastewater. Originally, I wrote this poem as one of grief—grief that in the future, our human activity may render the ocean lifeless and barren, that the current trajectory of climate change that we are on may strip posterity of the beauty and opportunities that have been given to us. Currently, many millennial and Gen Z leaders, such as Greta Thunberg and Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez, have already done such necessary work to rally the world around the necessity of slowing down climate change and to change the organizations and industries that have been large contributors to climate change. I also wrote this poem out of hope, then; if we all work together, I believe we can find ourselves in a better world. Writing is transformative in how it can encourage empathy and understanding, and my poem ends by asking if we can see “the whales returning” and “the ocean’s pale heart.” What I know is this: we can. I hope for this poem to serve as a reaffirmation of humanity’s capacity for introspection and growth.