call it ocean
Singapore
2020, Junior, Poetry & Spoken Word
rosy palms press drowned sand
and leave indents.
little feet tilt into glassy liquid and at once
the boy’s mind drinks in the feeling
and eyes grasp the world:
satin tides hog the day-fire in the infant hours
of an April dawn, wave-tips mottled: gold, faded blue, and white
nodding back to shore they lick between his fingers, quench the coast,
lean back, crease beneath his toes.
and again he looks at the fluid thing, with its lips on the soles
of his wet feet, and watches how it, ocean—mama calls it—
moves with the planet, moves at his touch.
ocean is alive.
it mostly reflects. but the boy sees through and in seeing,
captures a world:
mosaic-skin drifter, torn throat and plastic necklace.
harlequin limbs of porous stone-like clusters in the shallows,
ghostly, their skeletons starved from the caustic rinse
sediment stowed in the lungs so they cannot scream.
and he observes how the opaline fabric draws its line at horizon and carves
away this strangled world from the sky. the clouds are nescient to how the swimmer-dancers in their metallic apparel don’t wake up when current
nudges their sides. ocean—mama says—
is sick.
now aqueous glass laps at his waist. the little one holds a piece of ocean in his
hands knowing how the hands leave indent, knowing if hands can shape
hands can also heal
so hands reach into the saturated cloths and he absorbs the embrace of ocean’s
arms around him and he begins to pick the shards that poke out its rippled flesh
and the ones from the mouths of wild sea things; he does it till noon.
he looks where the eye of the sun gazes back at his and tells himself
that he’ll go there: to the silver water where the light is prideful and he’ll
breathe new colour into the deep gardens, tear away the lacework that
chokes them, plant living parts to renew the paled ones.
ocean—mama says—
is a planet
the boy wades back, hands in the heavy sand, lets the crests
rush to his calves, pull back. like a pulse.
he’ll come back tomorrow and every day after. He’ll bring his
friends. they’ll skim the glass planet
and handle with care—else it may break—
and he’ll teach them
to call it ocean.
Reflection
Reflection
Transforming crisis starts with seeing the ocean through the lens of a child, in learning to realize that the seas are moving and changing. The seas interact with our motion, react to our influence. The seas are alive. A child’s mind processes the textures, sounds, and pictures in their environments. They experience the sea in the temperature of the waters, the colours of the reef, the noise of creature against current—this grows in them a curiosity, a thirst to uncover what’s below. The fascination for something so majestic drives the mind to explore the very thing, and eventually establishes a deep admiration of nature’s work. When we re-learn nature and the ocean in the same manner, we find a new way to understand it: as a beautiful, wounded planet. I think that in learning to love the sea, a wish to protect and heal it naturally follows. Change in climate and in the world ultimately begins in the mind. Change begins in re-introducing ourselves to ocean: a diverse place, fragile, and breathing.