Seaside, Midwinter
Eugene, OR
2020, Senior, Poetry & Spoken Word
in nineteen-sixty-four, the Alaskan cackling goose says to me, an earthquake
raised the flood line of our delta, bore holes in our sedge meadow,
made long, flexible mud slats of our slough banks, so we winter
here, in the crevices of this moonlike Oregon dune. And this is why,
(he goes on),
I sit here with you, and watch the gray whale toss her head
into the oblivious, beaming night.
a whale whose name is set into life in bad faith:
whale (latin, squalas): “a large sort of sea fish”—
though you and I, we think it is a mammal,
more alike to heart-ish beings than the creature label ascribed to it
unfitly
by virtue of its propensity towards living modestly, living without harm
harm to others, the goose elaborates, because
it devours little, destroys nothing, and speaks never.
Un-human traits.
are we so alike? The goose asks me this.
and by extension I suppose, he says, the whale.
no, I reply. I believe I forfeited my right
to that genre of beauty, and of blindingly simple kinship
when I made your home a wasteland.
We can still be friends, he replies.
But it will not be easy.
still, his naivete strikes me
like a mother who must tell her children (children whose habit is kindness)
how unkind this brief moment, the one into which they were born, may be
I feel compelled to tell him,
that net entrapments and offshore oil drilling snag whales by the thousands
as they soar through their feeding grounds, that
the screeching maw of industrial traffic confuses them, sets them on the wrong courses, plainly,
and
isolates them from their loved ones.
I want to tell him that acidifying, warming, seas
ashy and taut with a glut of poison,
have a warrant out for your death. I want to tell him
that the shaking earth and subsequent pollution
that raised the Copper River Delta
and sent generations of your young screaming to the West
was sent by the same gambit, was a product
of our very human selfishness. That the barnacles on the side
of a gray whale
(which flash in the sun like diamonds on a dancing girl)
are ephemeral, by my (our) hand, clogged with the irrevocable wrongs of the past,
wrongs that cannot be righted,
sappy with empty promises.
I want to say this, but I do not.
Instead, I listen to him.
And the call
(goose, from Old Irish geiss, in playful imitation of the honking)
of his children, nestled into the sunny down of their beds.
I watch the sun set over the sea.
For forty-five minutes, casting a silver shadow
In the contours of his wings.
and I ask,
Does this feel like home? And he says,
I do not know. Maybe someday.
Maybe someday.
Reflection
This poem originally began as a class assignment in Literature to examine a cause we cared about through a lens of artistic expression. As I sat down to write about climate change, I found myself coming up empty. How can we encapsulate the worth of this planet in a collection of lines? I began to contemplate the winters I spent on a wildlife refuge in a rural part of my home state, where geese and whales migrated seasonally. I always felt a kinship to these animals—like them, I returned to this spot every few months, a little different than when I had last been. I started to imagine a future in which the natural world and humans spoke the same language. After years of witnessing the horrific effects of climate change, I yearned for that sense of communion. Throughout my research for this project, I learned that climate change is a crisis that affects every facet of our planet. Everything is connected to everything else; the movement of a river in one place is inextricably entangled with the wind in the trees here, and the migration of the whales there. With this sentiment came my first inkling of hope. I envisioned a world in which every individual person had a stake in the success of the world around them; in which nature was not seen as inert or useable, but alive. In this sense, my generation’s greatest crisis may also be our best opportunity for transformation.