Weltschmerz
Dhaka, Bangladesh
2020, Senior, Poetry & Spoken Word
Keep your ears pressed, down the spiral of its spine—a radio antennae—
The conch shell whispers
To the ballad of the water.
A womb for all earthly vessels: O ocean
With the sun and moon for her celestial guardians.
It is here, that the patient evolution and metamorphosis
Of vagus fragments begun, from the water forth and in
Their skeletons the human carries imprints of life as it was
Aeons ago. Tales of the world upon the tides
Weep through the conch
The beginning of many beginnings;
Our anthropological birth
This is another day
Another fleeting moment of the same slaving machines
As yesterday. And the same tyranny of the masters as yesterday.
Of industrial and capitalistic excrement of the marketeering-man
And a silent diffusing malady upon the womb.
Descending the foaming shoreline
Her marine realm grows silent—silence—
Predators disguised as disposable promises
Reining the ocean currents
Hemp hands, still and beckoning
Waiting,
Waiting to truss the sea horse, the turtle; strangling python coils
—pseudo crustacean,
O listen to the elegy of the ocean.
Clew of metal veins spew poison
Of atrazine and DDT; little ravines
Chlorpyrifos and mercury; darkling flowing
Cadmium, metam sodium, free—
Their pernicious passions permeating plasma
Of the marine biota,
And chemicals leach to cripple fertility
Of mammals,
Of vertebrae and invertebrae
That have their life siphoned out
Like leeches on skin—
O listen, to the elegy of the ocean.
Foraminifera upon a benthic landscape:
With the starry plankton above
Here since the ancient ocean lores—
Aeons more have passed.
And after continental transgressions and withdrawals
Is that a perforation in the bones?
One more; many more
Softening of calcite and aragonite
These gay, translucent tapestry of shells
Bleak shards now and insupportable
Of life.
One more; and many more
Slow disappearances without a trace—
O listen to the elegy of the ocean.
Excuse the fishing fleets,
Excuse another bleeding tanker
Or seismic drills in the trenches
Or the military sonar—of eavesdropping Trojans—
Beaching the whales, the dolphins, the seals
And creating a static wall so that there’s one here,
One there, which you let be that way.
There are freebooters posturing their power
Leaving deadly precipitations,
The default yet intentional colonization
But you they let it be this way—
O listen to the elegy of the ocean
Aeons more have passed
A miasmic sorcery continues to spoor out
Of their wretched hands and like a
A cascade of dominoes, voyages far and wide.
When a myriad of sardines surrender; upturned
When the coral too surrenders—like a carcass in the desert sun,
Shall NASA ever see another plankton bloom—the borealis of the sea
The one that, like the trees, resurrects the cells coursing through our blood
Shall the marine snow now be locked out of its cycle—
The cycle of carbon and water, saying
We are one with the ocean,
You two may have never encountered
But the ocean touches you
Everyday and so
Do you.
The cycle of matter: fractalesque and perennial
In every moment, every molecule
Will have met a different fate.
Listen—
Listen to the conch’s voice—
The voice of the sea plagued and crippled;
Far in line you may be, obstinately oblivious,
To your non-linear palindrome of consequences
For which the ocean was never an endless repository
Wake from this dream of her eternal resilience, because
As the pall is spread over the ocean
And you paw for the wormhole to Mars
Remember this may well be
Our epistemological
Death
Works Cited
https://www.nasa.gov/sites/default/files/thumbnails/image/northwest_vir_2015266_lrg.jpg
https://www.theguardian.com/environment/2018/jan/04/oceans-suffocating-dead-zones-oxygen-starved#img-1
Reflection
Weltschmerz is the German word, coined by the author Jean Paul, that roughly translates to "bearing the melancholia of the suffering and imperfections of the world." When I think of this word, I imagine all the pain of the world resting atop the shoulders and, in my mind, is a fitting embodiment of the state of our oceans—if we could map our emotions to the ocean. Reading articles and research papers alike, the very tangible notion of ocean death makes me scared. I live in a city called Dhaka, where three mighty rivers converge and flow to the Bay of Bengal. My father often says it could have been one of the most prosperous and beautiful cities, but the Buriganga River is as dark as night and has a horrible stench. As the countless steamers prepare to dock, all kinds of plastics, even diapers, are thrown out by the staff and passengers into the river already laden with industrial pollution. The plethora of ways that man has been able to destroy water bodies inspired me to write this poem on behalf of the ocean. I imagine the ocean speaking through the conch shell and voicing her harrowing accounts. If serious action is not taken, the death of the oceans will be ours, too. Along with the Buriganga River, one of my other early encounters with ocean pollution includes Rachel Carson's book. Apart from the brutal facts, what left an impression on me was that it was written in 1962, and things have only become pejorative. Change must start with the individual. I have given up, and continue to give up, my luxuries that serve the ocean otherwise in my diet and usage of plastic, and I have begun creating awareness within my school, friends, and family.