Beautiful, Where Did You Go?
Phoenix, AZ
2016, Junior, Poetry & Spoken Word
When I was about this tall,
I saw a young man at the beach,
His hair was just like the color of sand
That when he laid back against it,
Questioning the sky,
Eyes placid,
I couldn’t tell where the grainy sand stopped and his beachy waves began ,
His skin not just sun kissed, but smothered red by the sun’s affectionate glow, only leaving some patches of his body untouched,
He looked at me with Ariel’s blue eyes but with a wisdom she never had
Smiled at me so big that the ripples of his smile met his eyes
I blushed away to try and control the fluttery feeling in my tummy
And when I had mustered up the courage to look back
He was still standing there like a statue
His bright smile unwavering
Today I saw him again,
When I visited the ocean,
I almost didn’t recognize him,
Slumped against the wall of the entrance to the Fisherman’s Market,
His hair three shades darker with pieces of trash roughly woven into it
His skin now hollow and bare and without life
His once burly figure now considered morbidly obese;
His stomach bulging with all the junk he had eaten
His body decorated in plastic bottles and cups;
Some would have called it gaudy,
I called it sad.
He looked at me again with Ursula’s eyes;
No longer a clear blue but a toxic black
There was no smile this time
But instead a ratty piece of cardboard with the words Help Me pleadingly drawn on there
Again I blushed away
But not with the same fluttery feeling as before
But with a sense of pain and disgust
Wondering how something so beautiful got destroyed
I looked back at him
Sympathy in my eyes,
He had disappeared
As I walked down the aisle of the market
I had a realization
He was the ocean.
Reflection
Reflection
I wrote this poem as an attempt to convey that there is a ticking clock over our ocean because of the way we treat it. My inspiration for this poem came from my visit to a few of California’s beaches last year. The one thing they all had in common was their calming presence. Yet, I noticed that it was rudely interrupted by the significant amount of trash lying around the coastline as well as all over the beach. The ocean is praised for its beauty, but it can’t be accountable to that if we continue to pollute it. Instead of going into the specifics of marine plastic pollution, I focused on capturing the emotion people would experience if they watched something beautiful perish by their own doing. We need to actively fight marine plastic pollution to preserve our ocean. Otherwise, one day, we will look back expecting to see our beautiful ocean, but instead we’ll see a cesspool containing every rotten piece of trash we’ve thrown in there.