things i’ve learned from Ocean
Los Angeles, CA
2025, Junior, Poetry & Spoken Word
1. everything is consumed for a greater purpose
Ocean devours to dispose.
Students watch a white blood cell consume and implode in class.
I sit and stare in awe. It died for me. But I never thought to ask:
What does it feel like to be eaten for something bigger?
To become a lesson in decay, in retribution, in the price of existence.
I wonder, as the tide pulls back, if Ocean ever remembers her sacrifices.
Salt in her hair, kill on her breath.
She ate the oil, but it must’ve felt like it was eating her.
2. destruction is the first step toward renewal
Ocean lashes against the shore,
the cold biting at my flip-flopped feet and goosebumped ankles.
I collect seashells, running up the shore to show my mom the prettiest ones.
Ocean grinds the stones down to nothing, not because she hates them,
but because destruction is the only way to create something new.
As her fever rises, my muscles start to ache a little less.
3. what rests on the surface isn’t the whole truth
Ocean reflects the sky. It’s not plagiarism, just an abstraction,
catching the colors of the stars and clouds,
and twirling them into a sea salt solution.
Under the surface, there is no reflection, only truth.
Only week-old newspapers that report the air quality,
collecting in piles before degrading into the sand.
Ocean swallows headlines, leaving only residue of what once mattered.
4. leaving space for clarity is the best way to create
The oil spill.
His mother loosens her grip,
her tender palms fall limp,
and then he starts to trip and tumble, teeter, and totter,
flipping and twirling into the water.
The tattoo is born from a slow and certain rupture,
tasting the salt before the cold. Ocean clears my focus
as I sit on a jagged rock and sketch her twinkling eyes.
I inhale, deeply, and hold it—that breath—
until all that’s left is the open space between me and the horizon.
With my exhale, I draw on the gentle stain
left behind from the oil spill that headlined the newspapers last week.
One day, I hope the air will taste like salt again, not just gasoline.
Reflection
For this contest, I thought about how the ocean has shaped me as a human. We hear about how poor air quality and the deteriorating state of the environment impacts our physical health, but I wanted to use my poem to address the mental benefits of being in nature, and specifically near the ocean, in the format of lessons I have learned from it. Growing up near the coast, I was exposed to the ocean often. As a child, I would collect seashells, tracing the patterns of the shore with my fingertips, watching the waves pull the past from the shore. Even now, the ocean is my reminder of nature’s incredible ability to heal, to reset, and to rebuild what has been torn down. In the chaos of the waves, I see the possibility for transformation. As I grew up, I recall my interest in representing complex emotions through art and drawing the ocean near the shore. A major part of the artistic process is accepting what you see, and that is one of the lessons from the ocean that inspired me to write this poem: we can’t pretend global warming and deforestation don’t exist; the first step to saving our environment is accepting the condition it is in now, so we can find a way to help. The theme of “Connections to Nature” reminded me that nature’s impact reaches beyond the body—it touches our minds, our hearts, and the very core of who we are.