I. Why Did Climate Change Cross the Road?
Waterloo, Canada
2022, Senior, Poetry & Spoken Word
the wave clambers itself onto land
keeps rising higher. it’s the second before
the world will come crashing down:
everything is silent & motionless & mesmerizing
like lightning before the thunder
of screams start rumbling the sea,
i am frozen. wave looms over me
like goliath, growing greater by the second
transforming from beach to beast,
wave becomes wild again: stares me down
foaming at the mouth & i am between
its rabid teeth,
frozen. the sea keeps rising like tension:
there is no life flashing past my eyes only
anticipation.
the wave only knows how to go up
has not yet learnt what it means to fall,
a plot diagram a second before the climax:
a cliffhanger pushing me to the edge of my seat
my mind devises a million different endings to
the story:
II. why? why did climate change cross the road?
like any good joke, a second of suspense
clings onto my breath as i wait for the punchline
that will come trampling
down & down & down:
stealing my
laughter
& breath.
the wave reaches the sky
my feet rooted to the earth’s core
sea hovers over me, a hungry beast:
II. to get to the other side
waves come down. i am wet.
an anticlimax:
an answer too predictable
that i forgot to predict it.
gravity: any particle of matter in the universe
attracts any other with a force from
the product of the masses
but see, the wave and i, we
pull each other with a force
unmeasurable by a formula
when the sea collapses onto my body
i am unprepared, surprised
at its coldness ripping away my heat
i am waiting for the chicken
to do the unimaginable
and then it doesn’t:
wave & then under
climate & then changing
me & then gasping
the sea catches me off-guard
like the chicken. i laugh so much
at the joke, i lose
my breath.
Reflection
Reflection
The way we present climate change is similar to the rising action of a plot diagram, as the suspense of “the end” keeps building and our irreversible fate dooms closer. The media often predicts, at times fantasizes, a world plagued with climate change consisting of constant natural disasters, intensive famine, millions of climate refugees etc., as if we are not in this world itself. I chose to represent this vain dramatisation through a quintessential comedic anticlimax. I fused the light-hearted one-liner with my experience of being under a rising flood, as a symbolism of the simultaneously scary and ridiculous ending of the world. I looked at the poem from various angles, from the perspective of a joke, a harrowing personal experience, as well as a global one. My poem satirises our tendency to display climate change like a melodrama, as a form of entertainment instead of authenticity.