Tears From blue Eyes
Nawala, Sri Lanka
2018, Senior, Poetry & Spoken Word
Tears from blue eyes
Have you heard their cries?
If you haven’t then this will be a salty surprise.
It started when we began to modernize,
the world began to industrialize,
we got off our feet and took to the skies.
All their promises were just sickly sweet lies.
They told us that there was no need to compromise,
and that we should start an enterprise
and aim to maximise
all of our poisonous, plastic franchise.
The smiling faces served to incentivize
our need to glamorize,
our urge to optimize
our desire to plasticize
and our craving to oversize.
All we did was carbonize,
and death, legalize.
It took sometime to realize
that in our struggle to civilize
we forgot how to naturalize
and in our rush to catch everything: to utilize
it was the earth we managed to terrorize.
We made a few efforts to revise
the ocean we had managed to paralyze
but our urge to polymerize
only lead us to further vandalize
Commercialize, militarize and immobilize
The sea we intended to stabilize.
We must save them before they fossilize.
Now at sunrise
we see the plastic soup we didn’t penalize
the scalding seas we didn’t televise
the perishing polar bears who can’t vocalize
the harmless sharks we only managed to dramatize
the conscious beings, now store merchandise
Whales killed by our need to motorize
Harsh cries of gulls drowning in the oil we didn’t sanitize
And what’s the point of trying to apologize?
If we don’t start following the wise
Stop making fish into supplies,
and start looking with our own eyes,
it is Poseidon we jeopardize.
And what that implies
is that we just managed to catalyze
our future’s demise.
And tears will well from deep blue eyes.
Reflection
Reflection
I’ve always felt a little piece of the ocean in me. Living on an island (Sri Lanka) has given me amazing opportunities to get to know the sea, explore its secrets, and see its wonders. Sadly, the last couple of times I visited the sea, I fished out a plastic bag almost every minute. The reason I wrote this poem was to convey to people that in our blind rush to make everything more convenient and more commercialized, we have sacrificed the most vibrant place on the planet. My biggest inspiration was the sadness I felt, wading out into the ocean and seeing rubbish where, only years ago, there were fish. Consequently, with coral bleaching, shark finning, and "scientific" whaling, I feel like I'm losing that little bit of the ocean I have in me, and I know most of my generation feels the same. I wrote this poem in a simple, relatable manner with a constant rhyme scheme that mimics the ever-present rhythm of the sea, a reminder that we need to start with simple, steady steps. My aim is to tell the tale of the sea, the consequences of our actions, and to convey that ultimately, we are the only ones who can save the seas. But we need to start now because it will soon be too late. I only hope people derive strength from this poem, understand that these are our mistakes, and realize that we need to fix them.