Imagine That
Glendale, AZ
2016, Senior, Poetry & Spoken Word
Imagine
A crystal night
Moonbeams dance across the waves
And crystal bright stars\stand at attention in the night sky
Weeping, sobbing,
At the sight laid out before them
At the sight they cannot help
At the sight they could not stop
Imagine
The silhouette of a cap-sized ship
Of a diminished crew bobbing lifeless in the blackened water
As amber hands lay claim to the carcass of the boat
Curling ‘round their darkened fingers
Wreaking havoc on the surface
As the scent of heartbreak lingers
Imagine
The morning sun
Expecting to gleam through crystal waters
Reflected
Rejected
By the deepest, newest black hole
Dedicated to the sea
Imagine
A sky-eyed beast
Meant to soar, never meant to rest
Forever grounded in the open sea
Imagine
An armored dome, all flesh and slow gentility
Stuttering
And fluttering
And stopped, for all eternity
Imagine silver swishes
That no longer swish,
But rather sleep.
Sleep in sparkling ink,
Ink dark as coal
As breathtaking as the suddenness of cutting out the lights
As heart-wrenching as losing a life
Imagine that
Imagine thousands of eyes
Bright eyes
That cease to see
Imagine thousands of lungs
Strong lungs,
That cease to breathe
Imagine thousands of beings
Beautiful beings
That cease to be
And the thing that could have stopped it,
The very thing
That thing
Well it lies within you and me
We could have stopped this carnage
Instead we quit this war
We could have ended the need
Instead we left it there
We could have done so much more
But instead we left it there
We kicked up our feet
We tipped our hats
And said we did everything we could to help
… Imagine that.
Reflection
When I first heard about this contest, all I could do was think about it. I wasn’t initially going to enter, because I didn’t think I could win, but one night my mom came up behind me when I was browsing the requirements page, again, for the thousandth time, and began reading the behind-the-scholarship information. She said she couldn’t wait to see how I was making the world aware of the problems of the seas, and as she walked away, I told her I wasn’t going to enter, because I felt as though I couldn’t win. She stopped dead. She then asked me if the point of the contest was to win, or to heighten the world’s awareness. And then she walked away. And since that moment, I’ve been building and crafting and molding my poem to do just that. I melted down words, I boiled phrases, I begged the right things to come out, and picked everything to touch the senses. I wanted to panic the heart and burn the nostrils and bring out emotions they didn’t know they could feel, to make them aware of this. And when I was done, I began to revise and retouch and revitalize the words, attempting to breathe more life into them. I hope this is just a little something that could kick-start… something. Anything.