Watery Roots
Los Angeles, CA
2020, Senior, Poetry & Spoken Word
Though Homer wrought the sea wine-red, no blood had stained his hands,
for fishermen and sailors both sought just to meet demands.
Each fish hooked then was for good cause, none rotted on the shelf,
for ‘neath the waves, the man who ruled, was kin to Zeus himself.
Soon Romans praised aquatic life on walls with patterns tiled,
and thus that wrathful ocean god upon their navy smiled.
Five thousand miles to the east another people told
the tale of a girl whose father tried to have her sold;
she leapt into the Yangtze waves despite a blowing gale
but lived again as the baiji, protecting those who sail.
Concurrently, far to the west, in “undiscovered” lands,
Americans sung that the Earth upon a turtle stands.
In ancient Norway, Polynesia, India, Japan,
the sea was feared and respected but fared by ancient man.
A faster way to travel and a spring of food and life,
the salty waters also were a fount of death and strife.
But that was in a different age, an age of sails and oars,
when those departing well-known lands might never meet new shores.
For almost six millennia, we crafted hull and keel
with wood, until, not long ago, we tempered those with steel.
Though Mother Nature, still the fervent, pitched and rolled the seas,
no longer could she pull ships down or capsize them with ease.
As mankind learned to brave the waves with newfound iron faith,
the ocean’s once respected wrath faded to but a wraith.
The Goddess of the Yangtze, Neptune, Turtle of the Earth
all fade and take along with them the only things of worth.
Like we forget the countless river, sea, and ocean tales
we leave behind all water dwellers, fishes, squids, and whales.
In bringing ruin to the oceans we ourselves condemn;
for they can do without us, but we cannot without them.
Reflection
Reflection
Just 5,000 years ago, the wheel, written language, and sailboats were state-of-the-art. That level of “technology” is incomparable to what we have today, but despite our incredible progress, we are beginning to lose our ancient roots and the great respect for nature that came with our ancestors’ ignorance of the scientific workings of the world. I wrote this poem in iambic heptameter, a meter used by both Classical and modern poets, to illustrate the significant connection we have to that past. The alternating stanza lengths represent the consistent ebb and flow of the tides. I chose to discuss the "baiji" (the “Goddess of the Yangtze River”) because it is widely regarded as the first species of dolphin driven to extinction by humans despite its status as a symbol of protection and prosperity. Similarly, both Neptune and his Greek counterpart Poseidon were regarded as powerful guardian gods to seafarers. And the symbolism of the Native American World Turtle myth is very appropriate in this context; if we as a species hope to survive, we must see that our existence quite literally rests on the other species around us, and that we must change our ways accordingly. Because millions of those species inhabit the oceans and rivers, we must protect those bodies of water from the destruction we create. Yes, the fight to stop the oceans’ destruction is a fight for the survival of turtles, whales, dolphins, fishes, and other sea-dwellers, but ultimately, it is a fight for our own survival.