the ocean remembers
Singapore
2025, Junior, Poetry & Spoken Word
i.
The corals don’t speak anymore.
I thought I heard them once,
when I was younger,
soft as rainwater dripping into a tide pool,
but now I only hear the scrape
of what remains,
pale skeletons
now silenced by rising heat
and the greed of hands that take
without thinking of what they leave behind.
The ocean keeps our receipts,
each drop a ledger of what we take
and fail to return.
ii.
Sometimes I dream of the ocean’s rage.
Waves rising like fists,
a tsunami of vengeance crashing against the shore,
swallowing the cities that turned their backs on it.
But the ocean does not rage.
It mourns.
It recedes into itself,
its grief measured in tides that creep higher each year.
iii.
And still, we speak of Mars.
Mars, with its dry rivers and sterile dust,
as if we can carve a home out of red emptiness
when we cannot hold the blue in our hands.
I laugh at the arrogance of it—
at the thought of us,
so willing to leave
when we have not yet learned
to stay.
I laugh until the saltwater of my tears
feels like the ocean closing in.
iv.
I am here,
in the stillness of knowing
that the Earth will go on without me.
The corals will breathe again,
turning the ocean floor into a cathedral of jagged hymns,
long after my lungs give out.
The trees will twist their roots
through the rubble we leave behind
and wear the wind like a crown,
their roots carving stories into the stone.
The Earth does not need me,
but I need it
the way I needed the wind to braid the stories I was too afraid to write.
v.
The pulse of the ocean.
It is not forgiveness. It is not salvation.
It is a reminder—
of what it means to stay,
to grow,
to bear the weight of breaking
and still reach for the sun.
The corals will remember.
The trees will remember.
The Earth will remember.
And I will dip my hands into the sea, till the ocean sees that not all of us have forgotten.
Reflection
Reflection
The inspiration for this poem came from a trip I took to Taiwan, where I saw something that stayed with me—coral that had risen above the ocean, now part of the hills. It was a striking image, this reminder that what was once underwater had been lifted into the sky, a testament to time, shifting landscapes, and the Earth’s quiet transformations. While exploring, I accidentally cut myself on the sharp edges of one of these ancient corals. It was such a small moment, but it stuck with me—the idea that something so fragile in the ocean could become something so jagged and unyielding on land. That moment shaped the poem. It made me think about change, loss, and the marks we leave on the world, as well as the marks it leaves on us. Poetry, like the ocean, moves in waves—ebbing and flowing, breaking and retreating. I wanted the form of the poem to reflect that rhythm, shifting between personal memory and larger ecological grief. The fragmented structure, with its pauses and quiet moments, mirrors the way nature speaks in echoes, in things left unsaid. The ocean holds both history and consequence. It keeps a record of every action, every change, much like the corals I saw in Taiwan—once part of the sea, now part of the land, still carrying the memory of the water. Poetry, in its fluidity, allows for that same sense of transformation. It lets me explore how deeply human existence is tied to the natural world, how the things we touch—oceans, corals, even the air—remember us long after we are gone.