llips liO
Sugar Land, TX
2022, Junior, Poetry & Spoken Word
Oil spill
llips liO
lips
Lips stained with refined ebony, can you taste its tears in tainted waters?
plip
plop,
plip
plop.
See how the passing albatross glistens in its dapper tuxedo:
Tip my hat, “Good day to you too sir!”
A weak paddle forward is his gregarious response;
well, Monday isn’t everybody’s day.
Well-greased feathers are matted with ink,
leaving a smoky trail across weighted waves.
O, do those charcoal smears bloom into watered-down florets,
kissed with the caustic tang of petroleum that
reeks of fresh bills in ring-laden hands!
How would you even notice that the passing monsieur is
slowly sinking down, down into the stygian sea,
one that is littered with floating phantoms that don’t give a damn
about the true ghosts blanketing the ocean floor and turning our
seas into a corpse-like white,
about the polar bears who will soon suffer from
social anxiety over not fitting in,
about the penguins whose chicks will be signed up
for swimming classes while still in the womb.
How often does our Mother drag her hands
through the briny liquid
ensnaring the earth and admire the thick coat of
melted night that adorns her nails when she lifts
them out, guaranteed to last for decades?
So, be a good citizen and let your Marlboro slip
through your fingers; watch, watch as the outgoing ripple
kindles your forgotten flare, igniting slick black under forked
tongues dripping in red—how did we get here?
Then, without a warning, the
whole
world
is
aflame,
and Mr. Albatross will be late to work.
Reflection
I wrote a poem designed not necessarily to make you laugh, but to draw comparisons between the affecting and the affected, to guide you down from your fixed viewpoint of scrutinizing climate change as a human. Instead, I challenge you to perceive the downfall of Mother Earth through the eyes of a lone albatross, late to work due to an oil spill. Compassion is seen as one of the finest virtues of man, yet we are undeniably lacking it in the areas that require it the most! Discard your tainted perspective about what will happen to our species if our status quo continues; we are only 0.01% of all life on Earth. Witness homo sapiens’ corruption as a lithe sprig of grass; drown in despair as the melting outcrop of a penguin population; kiss the burnt ground as a displaced koala. I am not the first to give a voice to these overlooked aspects of climate change, and I will not be the last. We as humans are now reaping what we have sown, and the weight on our hands is dauntingly heavy, almost to the point where it seems unmovable. Almost. So, imagine the difference it would make if everybody in the world stopped what they were doing and, just for a minute or two, envisioned that they were an oversized seabird, rushing to catch the subway.