Inheritance
Dayton, OH
2025, Senior, Poetry & Spoken Word
i. a ledger of loss
once, my grandmother told me
the ocean tasted like sky—
salted freedom,
a breath you could swallow whole.
now it tastes like memory,
like the ink of a thousand receipts—
plastic bags shaped like jellyfish,
tangled ribbons of ghost nets,
bottlecaps engraved with the names of the dead.
the sea does not forget.
its body remembers every name we gave it:
landfill. highway. graveyard.
ii. the anatomy of forgetting
we replaced coral with concrete,
reefs with reefs of traffic.
once, the whales could sing across oceans—
now their lullabies ricochet off tankers,
drowning in sonar and diesel dreams.
we told ourselves: this is progress.
we paved coastlines with parking lots
and called it security.
we drank microplastics
and called it growth.
the future bleeds through every oil-slicked tidepool—
a jellyfish, translucent with hunger,
dances in slow mourning
beneath the shimmer of a six-pack ring.
iii. resilience is not silence
but still:
anemones clutch rusted cans
like children holding broken toys—
and still bloom.
mangroves, with salt on their tongues,
pull hurricanes into their roots
and anchor the wind.
a community strings oyster beds beneath piers,
teaches a river to breathe again.
a child scoops plastic from a storm drain,
hands trembling like a leaf
but steady with purpose.
iv. an ocean is a wound that sings
if you listen:
beneath the static,
beneath the engine-churned chaos,
beneath the sound of us breaking it—
the sea still hums.
it hums in the barnacle’s grip,
in the turtle’s crawling return,
in the slow regrowth of a bleached reef
finding color like a song remembered.
we are not too late.
not if we unlearn indifference,
not if we kneel before tidepools
and call them sacred.
v. an inheritance rewritten
i do not want to give my children a list of species
they’ll never see.
i want them to hold ocean water in cupped hands
and feel life, not loss.
so i plant eelgrass where the sea has turned to shadow.
i carve their names into driftwood,
not tombstones.
we build back with seaweed and intention,
with data and devotion.
we love louder than industry.
this is not hope.
hope is too passive.
this is resilience:
the act of remembering forward.
the sea rising—yes—
but not alone.
Reflection
When I was eight, I saw a seagull tangled in fishing line during a beach cleanup with my family. It was alive, barely. We called for help, but I still remember the way it looked at us—wild, afraid, as if it didn’t understand why the ocean it knew had turned into a trap. That moment stayed with me. Since then, I haven’t looked at the ocean as just something beautiful—I’ve seen it as something fragile, something pleading for help. “Inheritance” came from that ache. I wanted to write a poem that didn’t only mourn what we’ve lost, but also honored what can still be saved. I structured the poem in five movements, almost like tidal shifts, to show the transformation from guilt to action. Every image—ribbons of nets, oil-slicked tidepools, oyster beds planted by hand—was chosen to reflect both harm and healing. Writing this made me realize that environmental resilience isn’t just about restoring ecosystems—it’s about restoring our relationship with them. I’ve started volunteering more, talking to others, and thinking critically about how I live. The ocean doesn’t need our pity—it needs our partnership. We are not separate from nature. The sea’s survival is tied to our own, and it remembers everything. But we are the authors of what it remembers next.