Blue Mouth
Ceres, CA
2016, Senior, Poetry & Spoken Word
Yesterday,
It was still safe to swim
Within the luminous expanse of the Pacific
Acidic waves weren’t being
Periodically rushed out onto shore yet
I could stand there in the water as it splashed
Cold waves around my ankles
And look out at it
At the largest of the oceanic divisions
At the great blue mouth of the earth
Open wide, breathing and humming
With the many voices of the sea
I could see a future
Today,
I am afraid we are treating the ocean
We have been entrusted with
Like a dingy pool
In California’s backyard
We stand by and watch as it absorbs
Our careless human waste
We stand by and watch as its teeth
Of corals and barnacles erode and wither
In the carbonated soda we are creating
But our carbon feet continue
To walk all over
This cold country
Tomorrow,
There will no longer be
Fish or oysters or coral or anything
Shells will have dissolved
Animals will have gone extinct
California’s golden beaches will
Be famous instead for the acid
Churned out onto our coastlines
We will look at the dead sea we’ve created
And say, “The blue of its water once formed
The blue of our world.”
But our grandchildren
Won’t believe us
The Pacific
Can’t defend itself
From nations that emit carbon and greed
The blue mouth
Can’t extend its power at will
And swallow the homes,
The desalination plants, and the lives
We have built
To stop us from destroying it
But we,
We can listen closely to what
The blue mouth has to say
Because beneath the wild,
Whirling dark waves
A drum can be heard
A pulse—perhaps the ticking of a clock
Knocking at our hearts in vain
A reminder:
What has taken us mere decades to destroy
Will take millennia to recover
Reflection
Reflection
I am from California, and the Pacific Ocean has always been a constant in my life—something very familiar to me, something I care about intensely. I first became aware of the issue of acidification when I sat in on an Oceanography lecture held by my local community college a few years ago. Shortly thereafter, I found myself thinking often of the precarious state of marine life found in the Pacific today. I wrote “Blue Mouth” with the intention of simplifying the notion of time to three short days—our ocean’s past, present, and future, the future being something cataclysmic. I believe there is a fine line between salvation and disaster, maybe even a single day, and by emphasizing the concept of time I hoped to create a sense of urgency, because the gradual acidification of our earth’s oceans due to climate change is real and is happening as we speak. I grew up with the idea that the Pacific Ocean was something infinite and unconquerable, a blue, mouth-like aperture full of mystery and adventure, and I carry that metaphor throughout the poem. However, as I was writing “Blue Mouth,” I realized that it is this mindset that prevents us from seeing that our carbon emissions are hurting the ocean and doing away with key species of the oceanic food web. I hope my poem prompts others to stop thinking of our oceans as limitless and begin seeing that its future will continue to be jeopardized if we don’t change.