Salt-Water Song
Arlington, VA
2024, Senior, Poetry & Spoken Word
I. Prelude
I was five when I first met you.
High atop the suspension bridge
I peered out the car’s rear window,
my forehead pressed hard against the glass.
Transfixed and hypnotized, I watched
Your white-capped arms sway and swaddle and hug the earth in lullaby.
It was my father who introduced us.
As we drove the bridge’s spans day after day
Supplicants in silent procession across the Chesapeake Bay.
He’d say (with reverence)
There are whole worlds beneath her waves
Blue crabs, Rochambeau Oysters, Northern Stargazers
Ancient mariners who find refuge
In her estuarine depths.
He told me how
You beckon thousands to your shores.
Ospreys, Blue Herons, Bald Eagles.
Great raptors and fabled migrators
All who heed your aquatic arias,
Who join the chorus of those who nest and breed along your banks.
You are the Aleph– the Dawn.
Birthing wetlands and marshes.
Mother of ten thousand beginnings,
Weaver of a tapestry of countless species that you
Cradle and nurse, protect and nourish.
II. Requiem
I am a speck tossing in your turbulent waters.
High overhead the Chesapeake Bay Bridge looms
An ancient temple against a darkening sky.
I am miles from shore, the horizon slipping into the gloaming.
The cars move across the spans as I once did with my father.
They do not see me.
They do not see the rage in you.
Your mountainous swells encircle me like sharks to prey.
Your salty spray chitters and spits.
While the cormorants spiral above, omens of another storm.
I close my eyes.
I slow my breath,
and your salt-water song fills my ears.
I was born of Fire.
Born of Ice.
From a distant epoch
A streaking bolide.
Cratered and forged me.
I faced an Ice Age and melted glaciers.
Turned their meltwaters into nurseries.
I became the womb of worlds.
Birthing wondrous species
That evolved before you
That will outlive you for millenia more.
Now we lay dying
My temperatures rising
Dead zones spreading like lesions, suffocating my young
We are drowning in the deluge that is your dereliction.
Why should you be the one to survive?
III. Finale
You calm your tides, you slow your swells
And carry me in rhythmic embrace,
Setting me upon your outstretched shores.
A humbling. A dispensation.
I sink my toes into the sand and make a promise to you.
I hear your lamentations- atonal arpeggios of distress.
I hear the voice of the voiceless sounding from your depths.
I hear the cries of your dying oyster reefs, eelgrass beds, your decaying wetlands.
I will teach your song, I will sound your siren.
Send out your pleas to return life to your veins.
So that your seas do not become tempests.
So that your waters can breathe again.
So that your salt-water symphony can sing on.
Reflection
For as long as I can remember, the Chesapeake Bay – the largest estuary in the United States – has been a fixture of my childhood, from family vacations, to field trips, to long-distance swims in its waters. In writing this poem, I wanted to capture the Bay’s lifeforce – its singular power and beauty – as well as its fragility in the face of climate change. In this poem, I used my real-life experience swimming across the Bay, along with an imagined conversation I had with a personified Bay while swimming, to tell the Bay’s story. The Bay has survived millenia and is teeming with life. It is a refuge for over 3,000 species of animals and plants, from the Blue Crab to Great Blue Herons. But it now faces an existential threat from warming temperatures, rising sea levels and dead zones (low oxygen areas), which have decimated populations (like oysters) and weakened ecosystems and critical habitats (like eelgrass and wetlands). To frame the poem, I also invoked the metaphor of music because there is music in the Bay, its rhythms, and in Nature itself. I hope people who read this poem might feel that mix of awe, wonderment, humility and sadness that comes with looking up at the stars and realizing how small we are and what we’ve done to our world. And I also hope people might feel inspired to protect and restore the natural beauty and environment around them, wherever they may live.