mightiest of all the world
Belmont, MA
2020, Senior, Poetry & Spoken Word
In the beginning
she inhaled
a miasma sky and
held it beneath her depths.
poisons slowly entrapped by layers of life
laid to rest
each making possible
another recursion upon them
until even the land was lined with
empty-shell sand
empty homes of first life
when her work was done she shimmered
dark blue bright white
hiding with beauty the sins of early earth
reflecting
the clean sky.
and it was good
Go forth
she said
to life upon land
life that devoured rocks and ate the air
climbed mountains
soared
and died.
innocent
were the corpses of great trees
that sank into the flesh of the earth
we
swallow air perfected by the ocean
she expects nothing in return.
we scatter
with faintly webbed hands
cremated ashes of great trees
her creations.
we darken skies with coal soot fire
skies she once cleared
with the life she once gave.
we upturn
her deepest secrets
from Cimmerian quiet
and set them alight
only blackening our own world
in its turn
yet she forgives
powerful and gracious is the ocean
Mother of life
into her we dump
what the land could not take.
after taking our
nourishment warmth energy
what does she get but
death dark poisons
already
she holds more
poison gas fumes
than she does her own children.
soon plastics
formed from rotted corpses
in her burial ground of eons
will outnumber
the living
her colors change
a fiery dance in a coral dress
now somber mourning
skeleton white and
rotting rubber black.
the ocean
reuses life but soon
there will be
none to even pick her bones
can she still forgive?
she must! we say as if
our sins
were small and could
still be washed away
by an ocean of water.
Works Cited
Gruber et al. The oceanic sink for anthropogenic CO2 from 1994 to 2007. DOI: 10.1126/science.aau5153
Nietzsche, Friedrich Wilhelm, Thus Spoke Zarathustra: a Book for All and None.
UN News: UN’s mission to keep plastics out of oceans and marine life, https://news.un.org/en/story/2017/04/556132-feature-uns-mission-keep-plastics-out-oceans-and-marine-life
Reflection
I’ve probably been to the New England Aquarium at least ten times. Especially when I could see the diverse and colorful array of life, the fact that life could spontaneously emerge from the depths of the ocean seemed so surreal to me. But as I grew older, the contrast between the grey goo water of Boston Harbor and the life inside the aquarium also seemed to grow. When I began researching for this poem, I realized how much we really owed to the ocean, which sharply contrasted with how much damage we have done to it. The original title of this poem was going to be "Mass," a reference to the fact that by mass, we have put more ships and CO2 into the ocean than there is biomass inside of it. By UN projections, by 2050 there will be more plastic than fish. While writing this poem, I’ve been pushed to realize how tragic the fate of the ocean is, to have created the life that is now destroying it, almost akin to a matricide. In the poem, I start with the gifts and power of the ocean but move towards a darker tone that better reflects our modern-day situation. It is my hope that humanity can come to value the ocean more, to realize that it is a nursery for life and not a dumping ground for fossil-fuel wastes and fertilizer run-off.