Sea-elegy
La Canada Flintridge, CA
2021, Senior, Poetry & Spoken Word
Every night, the same dream over again:
mother tosses me into the mouth of a humpback
and expects me to find my way back home.
As if the backbone of a whale can chart out
a rite of passage toward the sand-starved
shoreline. Each cry for help an assemblage
of seafoam, hardened into a glass paperweight.
Repeat after me, the ocean is permanent and
permanent and how ironic is it to watch her eyes
clouded by plastic candy wrappers, her hands
stained grey with petroleum, her underbelly
whitened like bleached corals waiting for their
deathbed. As the humpback opens its mouth,
I catch a glimpse of a horizon without a shore-
line, wired with asphyxiation. The fish calcified
into bullets, drifting into the whale’s body.
This isn’t a dream anymore: I watch a dead
whale on its underbelly even before I watch
a dying mother. The waves are heedless
to salvation, only deposition. Which is to say
I will throw mother’s cremated ashes into
the water: no, the water will not save her.
Spilling the lament of a mother gone before
her daughter, prayers for a broken deity.
Water is loss, a liquid aching for mother.
I cup the ripples in my hands, listen to its iambic
syllables that whisper creation stories: lullabies
about an immigrant child, legends about ocean-
goddesses, poems about longing. Remember,
the afternoons spent frolicking in summer-
soaked waters, digging for diamond shells, all
the times mother held a conch shell to her
ears and hummed salt-stained melodies to me.
She told me her homeland is beyond the coast,
a country fed by red snappers and sea bass.
A country destroyed by floods and smogged
cityscapes. Just like the fading high tides,
mother vaporizes into carbon dioxide,
engulfs the city whole. This time, there are
no seagulls to recite elegies for the dead, no
sea turtles to scatter offspring into the sand,
no daughters to swallow mouthful of salt
water and claim the sea as her own. Instead,
only an influx of carbonic acid piping
through her arteries, lungs punctured by
oil spills from apathetic men on cargo ships,
her throat parched from the blazing sun.
Even then, I make a daily pilgrimage to
the beach and learn how to fish for mother’s
ghost. This love song is my offering:
early-morning aubades, foam relapsing
at my feet, psalms for tender waves.
Look, the full moon is retreating into
the blue-skinned skies, the tides following
its lead. I am no longer the only one here.
Myriads of children infiltrate the lone beach,
picking up every cigarette bud and candy
wrapper as they hum the aquamarine
tunes left by the sea. How the melodies
reverberate across country borders.
There will be no more mourning,
only sun-kissed mornings refracted by
the water. Water is a mirror. I gaze
and my reflection and see it replenished:
no longer watered down with grief, instead
glistening with pristine divinity. Here,
the aching will undo itself. Here, I liberate
myself from the menace of a humpback
whale. Here, water will save me and
bring back every inch of the ocean. See,
this is not an elegy but a reincarnation.
Reflection
Reflection
Although I have fond memories of my childhood frolicking on California’s beaches with my sister and friends, I’ve always been intimidated by the ocean. It is a basin for waste, whether that be plastic wrappers or the cremated remains of my grandparents. Interacting with an entity that signifies death and degradation has always scared me, and thus I distanced myself from the ocean. I reasoned that avoiding it altogether would somehow alleviate the physical and psychological damage on me. Yet, when I was brought back to the ocean for a school coastal cleanup, it struck me for the first time in many years that interacting with the sea was the only way to save it. Despite the grief and trauma that water brings me, picking up cigarette buds and plastic bags has revitalized me with a newfound sense of hope. My piece “Sea-elegy” echoes this sentiment, a poem that narrates how the actions of a small group of people can have a ripple effect on larger communities across the globe. What originally started as a lament for the death of the speaker’s mother becomes a way to empower the individual to replenish the sea. Given this shift in my poem, the role that water plays in my life has also shifted from loss to rebirth. Sharing my writing is the least I can do to reconcile my relationship with the ocean, but I hope the waves will hear my voice calling for them. Now, the ocean is not only my friend, but a treasure I will do my best to protect.