Saltwater in my Blood
Taichung, Taiwan
2025, Senior, Poetry & Spoken Word
The first time I touched the Pacific,
I was three—
my mother held me at the edge of Taiwan,
and the ocean kissed my toes
like it had been waiting.
They say we are an island people—
but I think we are just
soft things learning to stay still
when the earth quakes
beneath our bare feet.
Grandfather folds paper boats
from old receipts,
says each one is a memory he never had time to write down.
He sets them afloat in a bucket during Ghost Festival—
calls it a “private ocean.”
I watch them sink
like promises
made to a future
we’ll never stop fighting for.
Every morning I run past plastic ghosts
caught in banyan limbs.
In the cracks of the city,
green things grow anyway—
ferns sprout from sidewalk scars
like the land still believes in us.
I bike down to Taichung’s fading fields
where dragonflies hum like broken neon signs.
I pass old men crouched beside rice paddies
mending nets without fish—
but they hum folk songs,
as if the sky still listens.
Nature here doesn’t shout.
She endures.
She hides in the hush between typhoon warnings,
in the bones of the mountains,
in every ache of coral
bleached but breathing.
When I lie in the grass behind the MRT station
and close my eyes,
I can still feel the pulse of this island—
the part of me that is
stone and sea,
ash and rain,
a voice rising from the soil
saying:
We’re still here.
We remember.
We remain.
Reflection
I wrote this poem to explore what it means to be Taiwanese in a world where the land often remembers more than we do. The inspiration came from small, nearly invisible moments in my daily life: seeing moss grow through cracked concrete, biking past rice terraces slowly being replaced by skyscrapers, and watching my grandfather fold paper boats out of old receipts. I wanted to create something sturdy and intimate—something that felt like Taiwan itself. Through this contest, I’ve realized that connecting with nature doesn’t require hiking in a forest or diving into the ocean. Sometimes it means noticing ghost nets caught in banyan trees or hearing the ocean hum beneath city noise. Nature is not separate from us—it is embedded in who we are, even in urban life. My message is that we don’t have to live far from cities or be “perfect environmentalists” to care deeply about the Earth. Nature exists in our memories, our routines, and our culture. In my poem, I hope to remind others to protect the emotional and physical spaces where that connection still lives—because even quiet places and small gestures matter.