in which I construct another God from water
Taipei, Taiwan
2022, Senior, Poetry & Spoken Word
River meanders to make land for power plants
bent in the middle, the silhouette of a kneeling God.
My hands are polluted with crime but the world is no clean marble
slate, I want to give Him lungs but I must first start with eyes.
blue (noun):
1. the color of His eyes is also a symbol for sadness, and I
asked the river about its melancholy but couldn’t hear its
response—only the echo of my question, ricocheting
through a womb of black crude oil.
2. When I was younger I drew with chalk on the sidewalk
next to my childhood house. The blue one always was
the shortest, rubbed into sapphire skies, yellow sun
in the top left corner, and I used to expand the empyrean
until my knees were scraped from the rough sidewalk stones.
Years later a hurricane would slash across my homeland as I
sat in airport lights, praying to a God that I had yet created.
Crude oil palm pressed against slashed-and-burnt palm, but the hand
I touched was an abuser’s callous, the one that had pushed the sky
to its coal-colored limits. Extreme climates from extreme
pollution, Hammurabi’s Code tatted under God’s black tongue.
Post-modern, and I wonder if there are remnants of chalk
dust in an address that has never been encoded in my head.
house (hypothetical):
1. Earth, I think. And that white-columned bungalow
that broke down in a rainstorm. Somewhere halfway across
the world, a girl my age wishes for rain.
2. In Mandarin, the mother tongue I spoke at home,
the highest compliment for a woman was to be cold and beautiful
like an iceberg, and I think maybe this was one of those old
Hollywood movies, in which the beautiful woman is destined to
death. Cold and beautiful and dead like an iceberg.
3. I have grown to build a house of my own and in the house there is
an altar in front of which I kneel down next to my God. The river
that meanders is crooked like one half of His pair of bleeding
knees—for one must first count His feet in twos, then separate
each vessel, the unholy image of mitosis
in a gas-station metaphor.
4. To the girl my age halfway across the world: come live
in my house with me, come live on my Earth.
It was her touch that set me ablaze—the human body consists
of sixty-percent water but my God’s skin is two-thirds liquid blue
and the lungs I had wanted to paint Him, one bloated with
toxin seawaters, the other dry and cracked like a clay sculpture
abandoned by its creator. The girl my age lights one of
my God’s lungs as a cigarette, Eve and her forbidden fruit,
telling me with a politician’s dentures that we still
have more time to spare. Heat waves of ashes coarser than
the chalk I used to draw with, flood my newly built home, the girl
my age has Icarus wings as she dives into
the heart of apocalypse. I smother my thirst by
thinking about all the melting icebergs, and dead, beautiful
women. (non-existent)
1. And neither does the God I have constructed from water exist.
Blue can still be a symbol for sadness
without it being the shadow in His eyes.
2. Bleeding knees are real and ache for every hurricane/
pollution/flood/drought, with blood the color of magma
from every volcano that wasn’t supposed to erupt
for another decade. Beautiful women are compared to icebergs
perhaps because their death on the horizon makes them more beautiful,
the evanescence of ice stirred with the impending countdown of
mythological tragedies. The abuser’s hand is also real.
3. River that cowers to a city is not a God but a woman with fruit-like
bruised skin. In every hurricane she destroys a chalk sketch screaming
in the agony of childbirth, the creation of heathens, of homo sapiens
that go back to bite her throat off, uncleaned.
Tide turns against our favors once more, this time bringing down
every altar, even the written lines of my words,
and I laugh along with the girl my age when she points out
how many layers of metaphors I had to pile on, as defense,
just to tell this non-fiction story because the human heart
cannot find the rhythm to tremble for the un-personified
natural world, unbeknownst that the thing
about climate change is that fate is in our own oil-rigged
fingertips, slipping on the inclination of a graph depicting
the rise of global temperatures, until forced into the realization
that climate change, scorched to its bone, is unbearingly human.
Reflection
Through the research I’ve done in preparation for writing my poem, I discovered a pattern that I wasn’t expecting to learn about—the behaviors of climate change deniers. Their many unjustified claims and false ideas made me realize the urgent need for improved messaging for environmental issues, and though it was upsetting to see so much from the opposing side, I was glad to have encountered them, for the experience has aided me in constructing what I believe to be a poem that those indifferent about climate change could get behind. As always, I will continue to research and spread awareness about environmental concerns, and unlike before, this time I will experiment with less scientific and more emotional-based arguments.