My Body is a Tidepool
Plainsboro, NJ
2025, Senior, Poetry & Spoken Word
Some days, I am moss.
Soft, small, unnoticed—until you kneel and feel how alive I am.
Other days, I am salt wind—carrying memory from shore to shore,
Trying to remember where I began.
I once thought nature was a place you visited.
You bought a park pass, packed trail mix, took pictures.
But nature is not a destination.
It’s a rhythm.
A reminder.
A breath you didn’t know you were holding.
It started with silence.
Not the empty kind—
the full kind, humming with insects and leaf-breath and the creek’s small song.
I sat by the river, and for once,
Earth didn’t need me to speak.
I learned its name: Assunpink.
Lenape for “stony, watery place.”
A name older than asphalt and suburb.
A name like a prayer.
I dipped my hands in the water;
It felt like touching a vein in the earth.
I imagined every river connected—
Threaded across continents like essential arteries.
And I was one of them.
A tributary. A ripple. A witness.
So, I began to listen.
To test the water, count the frogs,
And pull the plastic debris and litter,
Like splinters, from the soil.
I am not a hero in this story.
But I am an active Samaritan
I am a body returning to its biome.
Because the truth is:
My body is a tidepool.
My bones are the coral,
My breath borrowed from a tree I’ll never meet.
The ocean doesn’t end at the beach—it begins in my bloodstream.
I go outside to remember I’m not alone.
I look inside, reflecting and remembering.
That nature is everything.
Reflection
I came up with the idea for my poem while walking by a local river near my home golf course. At first, I had no plan of writing anything, but being outside helped me feel at ease and like I was a part of the environment. The sound of the water and the wind in the trees helped me think more clearly, and I started imagining how nature is not just something we see but rather something internal to humanity. That’s how the poem “My Body is a Tidepool” began. Through this project, I learned that connecting with nature can be as simple as noticing what’s around you. I also realized how nature reflects who we are and how we live. In my poem, I show this by describing how “going outside brought me back to myself.” The theme Looking Inside, Going Outside helped me understand that taking care of the Earth also means taking care of ourselves. My message is: nature is not separate from us—it’s part of who we are. We should protect it like we would protect each other.