“Today Was the Last Beautiful Day On Earth”
Seoul, Republic of Korea
2024, Senior, Poetry & Spoken Word
Today the sweet potato vines bloomed.
An old woman passing by the yard clucked her tongue,
and said, looking at the little purple trumpets,
“What a shame, what a shame.” I looked, too, at the
glorious green leaves, and the flourishing flowers, and
didn’t understand, didn’t see why the old woman was so
troubled. She stopped to speak to my mother, who
nodded her head and repeated, “What a shame, what a
shame. They should never flower here, not unless the
weather is too warm. Not unless there’s something wrong.”
I had heard words like these before. Warnings, cautions.
Messages, omens. Our world isn’t safe anymore, people say.
Our oceans are dying. Farmers and families lost everything in
the Hawaiian wildfires, the poor in Delhi and East Africa need
relief, and fruit bats, in search of cool water, fly around and around and
fall to their cold, quiet deaths because the water has grown
too hot for them to drink, to live.
At first when I heard that humans were responsible for the fires,
the plastics in the ocean and in the bellies of the fish, the deaths
of the fruit bats and the penguins crossing the oceans, I thought,
“Well, we will figure out a way.” Human beings always figure out
how to solve problems, my teacher said. We sent people to the
moon, we built connections between continents deep below
the surface of the oceans. We can fix anything. We can even
revive dinosaurs, if we want. If we want, we can save the bonobo
and the avocado trees. It’s easy to believe them when I forget my
troubles at the shopping mall. When I stand under the skylight in
the brand-new artificial garden, when I watch the other shoppers
stand together and take photos in front of beautiful displays of
flowers someone crafted with the cool water those fruit bats needed
yesterday, the water that would have saved the taro farm on the Big
Island, the electricity and the plastic and the gasoline that went into
engineering these Instagram-ready photo spots I think:
“Remember today, because today was the last beautiful day on earth.”
Reflection
Reflection
I'm an artist and poet from Seoul, South Korea. Many of the things I hear about the changes our planet is going through due to climate change actually come from older relatives and neighbors. I visit the countryside often with my family and our older relatives make many remarks about the changes they see in the smallest things, like the sweet potato vines I wrote about in my poem. Many of our elders in South Korea grew up around or before the Korean War when the country was much more rural and before industrialization. Since I was born in 2006, I haven't known a world that didn't look incredibly high-tech and modern. I don't know the names of many plants and trees and flowers by sight the way my older relatives and grandparents can. They are connected to the rhythms and patterns and changes of the natural world around them in a way that I am not, and that inspired my poem. After doing more research on climate change and reflecting on the feelings that went into my poem, I am more determined than ever to contribute to the fight against climate change. I believe the work that the scientists who study migration patterns and the changes of temperatures in the oceans are doing is just as important as the observations of the elders and others who are more aware of the natural environment as it used to be before our planet went through so many rapid changes. I hope to create more projects to create more ways for us to record our nature-lovers' observations about the changes we are seeing and hopefully create plans to stop or revert those changes.