Too Much Ocean
Allentown, NJ
2019, Senior, Poetry & Spoken Word
I take the polar route back from London,
looking out upon a world,
changing,
too fast.
Out the window, sunlight shines against the
formation of plush clouds,
soft in shape,
gentle in nature.
35,000 feet below I gaze upon that same sunlight,
beaming, reflecting against the glistening ice of Greenland.
An endless expanse of beaming white,
peaks and plains of the mysterious, beautiful polar world
standing strong.
Sturdy.
There’s a permanence to the permafrost.
Five years later,
I take that same polar route from London,
And I see
ocean.
That endless sea of ice, transformed into
a plain of deep, velvet blue hues,
surrounded by craggy ice peaks that float
alone.
Isolated.
Vulnerable.
Broken.
The sun continues to shine down onto this
vastly different world,
Yet, it isn’t the sun that has caused this destruction.
I have.
This Boeing 767, soaring at 500 miles per hour, has.
We have.
The ocean vitalizes us;
It gives us life.
But too much ocean will kill us.
I touch down at Newark and travel along the coast,
gazing into the future:
Sand mounds struggle with
dying breaths to withstand the surge of waves that slowly begin to
creep, walk, jog, then sprint away from the shore,
invading the streets of Belmar,
Ocean City,
Cape May,
Red Bank,
LBI,
flowing mercilessly into homes and businesses,
carrying with it more than just furniture and broken infrastructure.
Washed away in this river of destruction will be people’s
livelihoods, their histories, their loves,
their hearts.
We saw it in 2012.
We’ll see it again:
The power of too much ocean.
Reflection
I’ve lived in New Jersey all of my life. In 2012, when Hurricane Sandy struck the Jersey Shore, communities were wrecked. Businesses were destroyed, homes were washed away, and with them were the memories of families and friends. The destruction was massive and devastating. As climate change continues to cause rising sea levels, coastal communities like those in New Jersey continue to be threatened. The question then becomes, how can we build and adapt to what’s to come? In my piece, I wanted to capture this threat of “too much ocean.” Whenever I’ve flown to Europe, aircraft usually take polar paths over northern Canada and Greenland, and I’ve been shocked to see, even in the past five years, the changes that have occurred in these polar regions, changes that will affect regions across the world, even those thousands of miles away. And through this, I also wanted to capture the emotional toll that community destruction can have, like it had on our coastal communities in 2012. Rising sea levels is not a problem of tomorrow, it’s a problem of today.