I Took My Heart Out To Sea
Fremont, CA
2016, Senior, Poetry & Spoken Word
Leaning against the bridge, arms apart,
I spanned 16 years and an ocean.
Foamy waters laced shore fronts
Seaweed nets swept ocean floors
Delicate sand blanketed coastal lines
The beauty of the above,
Oh so clever and so captivating,
Beguiled me.
With each breathe, soft white hands caressed a sacrifice.
With each breathe, I lost a year.
Oil infested runoff leaked from streets of my contemptible home
Well blowouts drilled their way to this bay
Hydrocarbons exhaust from industrial sites to river banks
Sleeping and Seeping
Into the soil we plow
Into the sand we lie
Into the ocean we capitalize.
The treasury poisons of our own creations
(((petroleum)))
The dear consumerist products we so acclaimed
(((petroleum)))
The ones we treat as commodities
(((petroleum)))
The ones we force as sacrifices
(((petroleum)))
It all ended here, amongst the treacheries of exploitation and corruption
(((humanity)))
Oh so hail to the forgotten land!
My worries, my wastes, my chemical weapons begone!
The substance of the past now buried within the future
“It’s only one more”
But when is one, just not so fun?
When is one, such as a gun?
I took my heart out to see
Reality…
Reflection
Reflection
Digging my toes into the sand, I ran through the seaboard, toward the ocean of the unknown. With hopes as high as midnight skies, I danced along the seashore until my eyes met with the deep blues of my visions. But as my toes inched its way towards harder sand, a strange aspect of the waters, discordant from my previous expectations, caught my eye. At first the iridescent, almost alluring coloration attracted my naive heart. Yet I knew this wasn't normal, wasn't healthy. This coloration spanned farther than the horizon's crests. What I saw that day did not fulfill my innocent heart's content. That day, I parted with the ocean. With only a few weeks ahead of me before my Awesome Aquifers Science Olympiad competition, I coincidentally stumbled upon a picture that led me to the explanation of this mysterious spectrum of colors at the beach. The diagram showed an industrial site over-pumping a well along with multiple arrows indicating urban runoff, especially oil. With further research, I learned that this oil caused the “mysterious spectrum of colors.” This verdict allowed me to become more aware of the beautifully deceptive nature of our creations, that this rainbow of colors in the ocean was rather evidence of a crime, and humanity, its perpetrator. With this poem, I hope to draw attention to the increasingly harmful oil pollution dilemma that may still be hidden within the innocence of one’s minds, as it did for me.