to unstitch a mouth
Wilmington, DE
2021, Senior, Poetry & Spoken Word
when it does not rain for the 100th day,
my mother says to keep my mouth
closed & head down, to hoard
each water molecule within my tongue,
twisted like a lock without a key,
a house without a door,
a desert without an oasis.
blue news crawls
creep across tv screens,
pearly white teeth pointing
with shriveled pale hands at the
weather forecast. my mother
tsks without opening her lips,
the wrinkles in her brown face
barely shifting. suppose they said:
miracle today, god (any of them)
has taken pity on our raisin bodies.
suppose they said: take fewer showers,
drink less water. conserve, preserve,
& hush,
don’t speak of the smokestacks,
the drills,
the pipes,
the steel replacing soil.
suppositions sew my mother’s
mouth shut & they have started to stitch
mine as well. the needle tastes like salt.
it is a good sign: inhaling brine is the first step
to drowning and i have learned
there is no such thing as too much water.
but somewhere beyond the dust-laden plateaus,
a voice whips through the air,
cracking stones open
& bodies bare,
the words of a wise woman
or the songs of saguaro spines:
the clouds are choked
too tightly for water to trickle
out, miracles cannot break the grip,
only human hands
& open mouths.
Reflection
Reflection
This piece was inspired by my readings of the various governmental reponses to climate change. Although there has been general scientific consensus that human-caused climate change is happening and has been an enormous problem for decades, in many countries, there has been extremely limited legislative action to try to stop it. According to various social scientists, the biggest reason is because human brains aren’t wired to register long-term, gradual changes as problems that need solving. Because of the lack of observable immediacy by a layperson, people simply don’t do anything. This is compounded by the fact that the types of environmentalist rhetoric that do succeed focus on an individual’s contribution. For example, people are encouraged to eat less meat, recycle, and buy food locally. However, the main drivers of climate change are not individuals, but rather corporations that generate hundreds of millions of metric tons of emissions. My poem mirrors this by having the mother character encourage the speaker to sit idle while climate change-caused droughts ravage her home, but ultimately, the speaker realizes they must open their mouths and speak up against the systemic issues of climate change. The setting itself is also a product of having visited my sister who lives in California, where droughts have become more and more frequent. This exploration of climate change and water has led me to join environmentalist organizations in my area that use their voices to create systemic change and pressure corporations to stop climate change.