Collateral
New York, NY
2016, Senior, Poetry & Spoken Word
Yes, there’s a case to be made
for the resilience of human will.
So invincible
in its roots and wishes.
Tends to override
whatever it finds in its path.
Buy my things,
Find my fuel,
Have my fun.
We the people are waiting, now and forever.
Speeding along
and pushing aside
the roadkill
piling up on the coasts and curbsides.
Fins and wings coated in oil
black like tire marks
leaving
a crime scene.
Plastic rings entangling
the clear strands of jellyfish
that would glow in the
night.
Turtles wrapped in netting
green
like their own skin
consumed.
They’re all sandy in their resting place,
out of breath, still
in sight but
they’re out of mind.
All because we are creatures
by nature breathtakingly infallible.
We tumble from the stork’s nest
with fists gripping all the world and what it owes us.
And yet, things were different before.
We were always persistent but
never so deadly
reckless.
Hemingway’s man, he took his shots
to drown his part of the sea, hold his catch steady as the rest of them.
He would stand at his seaborne mast,
meet his brother with new pulls to rack his body.
Oh boy, lined hands, old
man with the rope-burned fingers.
Not once did they soften until the very
moment he mounted his trophy on his mast.
And still it slipped,
reclaimed by the sea that fathered
it, the ocean folding Santiago’s legacy into its depths
saying better luck next time, son.
And the old man, he
left the ocean that day
done
and defeated.
We kept at it, though,
asked for more from the one that fed us,
trading the air and water it gave
for oil.
Well, we have come far,
have we not?
Shark, marlin, whale, every marine you-name-it lies
at our feet or on our table in the millions.
So today we swallow our trophies in droves.
Fish and chips
with a side of milled
microplastics.
We sure have made it, by God,
the dream is real.
Don’t you see, old man, all your trouble
was not so necessary.
All we really had to do was follow
our instincts, build our ships bigger!
Kings of the world, and the rest is
collateral.
Reflection
Reflection
One of my most recent memories of my grandfather is walking along the shore with him in Korea. Throughout the time he was a teenager and until his late twenties, he worked as a fisherman, living at sea for months at a time. On our walk, he told me about the sheer amount of effort that went into catching a single school of fish: how long it took to map patterns and plan for every scenario. He told me about how his crew knew not to take too much, because it would be shortsighted to deplete the area's supply all at once. He spoke with a kind of reverence for the sea and its vastness.
It saddens me beyond words that the oceans of today are killed by carelessness. Today, the single most common element in the ocean is plastic, dumped there by our fellow consumers (Conserve Energy Future). When I shared this fact with my grandfather, his face took on this weighted weariness and he looked at the ocean as if in apology. Thinking back, I know that day with him is something I'll remember for the rest of my life. What worries me most now is that this memory will outlive the very ocean as he knows it.