Blue
Denton, TX
2021, Senior, Poetry & Spoken Word
Somewhere in San Bernardino, midday, sometime in late August, our clothes are sprawled across the front lawn, like sheds of our own skin, drying themselves out in the Californian sun.
You’ve talked about it for months: how the world will end in fire and only fire, brittle from cracked earth and dried-out rivers. It’s almost like your tongue will get stale from speaking out about it so much, almost like your tongue will give in before the world finally does.
And in the front yard, freshly trimmed by our neighbor—a Doomsday prepper, which is something you two had in common, expecting that the world will end when nobody else did—we had stepped out into the thickness that every summer rolled over us, swallowing us up, whole. You turn to me, no resistance in your body: “I want you to feel it. I want you to feel how she feels.”
We spent that entire day outside, drying our clothes on the grass, you locking the front door so that the two of us couldn’t have a glass of water, which was your intention, of course.
I want you to feel how she feels. I didn’t question who you were speaking of—the mother that you’ve always had, the mother that you’ve learned to love—how your culture so profoundly cared for something inanimate, how you held onto something completely lifeless, but whole, all at once. You pulled the stereo out onto the front porch, playing one of the songs that you always loved: Rhapsody in Blue. A piece so aggressive, but subdued, simultaneously. We sat there in lawn chairs, the rhapsody on repeat, playing through the speakers while several people idled by, staring at the protesting anomaly that sat in our neighborhood that day.
I want to ask for your forgiveness, Ma. I want you to know that I tried to understand what you were going through, how after the bombs and the droughts and the dirtied water, I tried to recognize how your mother was slowly passing on. A slow death that keeps playing, just like the music that day, over and over again until we both felt it in our bodies, the rising waters in our own blood. I want you to know that it was hard to see when the water did rise, my eyes muddied with green, my throat filling with thickened oil, suffocating, all at once. I want to tell you that when the water rises past your throat, it’s hard to say anything of worth. It’s hard to say anything at all.
But you didn’t. You stayed afloat, still waving your arms in objection, the ship already sunken down, the lifeboats already drifted. And I know you’ll continue, and I know that you’ll always have another thing to say, your tongue never dried.
Tell me how to do it, Ma. Tell me how you did it that one August, the rhapsody in our eyes, covered in blue—Blue. I want to get back there again, where the river still has a steady current, where the world feels important again, somehow, whole, all at once.
Tell me how to live in a world where you want to be in that place forever. That place where you can feel the water grasping at your toes again, the feeling of walking on water, flying on endless blue—Blue. I want to be there, Ma, with you. I want to feel our throats and the rhapsodies and the oceans and my world turn blue—Blue, everywhere, all at once.
Reflection
Reflection
Finding a way to find courage to speak out about certain issues can be tedious at times. But most days, throughout all of the chaos that the world has to offer, we find small sips throughout our lives to speak on about the things that matter to us the most. In this poem, I found the words to describe this feeling. I found a way to define the emotion of already giving up on something that you lose hope in. Hope comes in all colors, and for me, I find hope in blue. I want the world to be that way, a world that I never got to experience. Blue, everywhere at once. It comforts me to know that there is a large population out there, all objectifying climate change, all fighting for ocean awareness, and it humbles me to know that I am not alone in this.