Have you heard of korrel?
South Pasadena, CA
2021, Senior, Poetry & Spoken Word
Mr. _____
can’t even remember his own name.
Old as hell,
and he’s probably lived through it, too.
A real good storyteller,
he spins tales of his youth, of
The Old World,
weaving words into the fabric of a life
I wish I could have.
He says there were “glassers” in the Old World,
enormous chunks of solid water
floating
in the oceans at the bottom of the world.
He says there was “korrel” in the Old World,
colorful masses of living, growing stones,
castles of the creatures under the sea.
I know he’s crazy,
but sometimes,
I like to imagine that his world is real.
What a beautiful place The Old World is.
was.
Now The Old World is gone, and
it’s only me
pretending.
Come.
Pretend with me.
Pretend there are glassers in our world,
Pretend there is korrel.
Don’t
listen to the sound of the black waves lapping against the shore,
the hissing of the noxious gasses rising from the warm water in protest.
Don’t
watch the grey expanse above us,
dimly lit with a hopeless smoldering red on the horizon.
Instead
close your eyes and dream of a world,
a time away,
where the water is clear
and the sea is blue.
Reflection
My poem is about a time in the future when warming oceans and continued human pollution has led to the complete disappearance of glaciers and coral. I wanted to express the beauty of glaciers and coral through the eyes of someone who never got to see them. The narrator wants to imagine living in the world described to him by Mr. _____, but no matter how hard they try to pretend, they can’t help but notice the awful state of the real world around them. I chose to spell glaciers and coral incorrectly to show that the narrator really has no idea what those things are and that he is learning about them with a childlike wonder. At the end, the narrator asks the reader to pretend with them that we still have glaciers and coral - but we are lucky enough that we don’t need to pretend! Though glaciers and coral reefs are rapidly disappearing, we still have not lost them. Through my poem, I hope to remind people of the beauty of the oceans and the motivation behind our fight to protect them.