“Maybe they’ll never know.” by a kid who just wanted to surf
Seoul, Republic of Korea
2025, Senior, Poetry & Spoken Word
“Maybe they’ll never know.”
by a kid who just wanted to surf
Every Friday is beach day.
I tossed my math textbook into the backseat
along with my half-eaten roll of kimbap.
It rolled under the seat next to my boogie board.
The air was thick with something burnt.
Not like Appa’s k-barbecue on Saturdays,
but wood, cedar block, and maybe… furniture?
The sky didn’t sing summer today.
It had the color of Appa’s coffee.
Even the seagulls flew low.
The clouds were pressing down on them too.
We pulled into Huntington Beach.
Umma breathed through her nose, slow, like she didn’t trust the air.
She kept muttering about how close the fire came last week.
“I swear it’s never been this bad.”
I ran sole-naked into the sand,
hot like a fresh tortilla pan.
Board in hand, salt in the air.
But the water wasn’t turquoise.
Not even green.
It was the color of a bruise,
swirling with flakes like dandruff.
I waded in anyway.
‘Cause that’s what we do.
Even when things are wrong.
The first wave left a scratch on my tongue
not from the salt,
but from something metallic.
Below my board,
I saw clumps.
Not seaweed. Grey fluff,
dissolving into foam
And that’s when I knew:
The fire didn’t stay in the hills.
It followed us. Down the urbanized census tracts, through the storm drains,
into the water.
Umma says wildfires mess with the sky.
But Ms. Singer from science says it’s more than that.
He said ash is full of stuff,
Nitrogen. Phosphorus.
Things that feed the wrong plants.
Algae sucks up the oxygen, chokes.
I looked at Mom.
She smiled, holding out a towel.
I didn’t tell Mom I saw the dead fish.
Or the coral graveyard,
just below the shelf where the reef used to bloom
On the ride home,
I opened my math book.
I tore out the last page
and wrote:
The ocean isn’t blue anymore.
It’s sick.
Wildfires don’t end when the trees stop burning.
They come here, too.
I folded the page and slipped it into my pencil case,
next to my bubblegum-smelling eraser and my grape-smelling highlighter.
Maybe one day, when someone asks me what an ocean is,
I’ll read it aloud.
Or maybe I won’t.
Maybe they’ll never know.
Reflection
Reflection
Fire and water do not go well with each other. So when recent wildfires harmed California land, I wondered whether they had affected my frequent weekday visits to beaches in Los Angeles and San Diego when I used to live there. I thought about how even something as distant as a wildfire, burning miles away in the hills, can follow us all the way to the beach, killing marine life. Wildfires release harmful nutrients and chemicals, nitrogen, phosphorus, even heavy metals, that flow from burned neighborhoods into rivers and eventually into the ocean. These invisible forces disrupt coral reefs, poison fish, and fuel harmful algal blooms. I wanted to tell a story through the eyes of a child who loves the ocean, as someone who is both innocent and perceptive. Through this project, I reflected on the idea that nature isn’t something outside of us. It’s not just a place we visit or swim in. It becomes a physical part of us: the air we breathe, the water we drink, the grief we feel when something beautiful disappears. With the grief that, in the distant future, oceans may never exist the way they once did, and that when we forget, and go back to pretending things are normal, I hope my poem reminds people that the first step to protecting the ocean is realizing how much we need it, and how much it needs us.