What We Once Were
Richmond Hill, Ontario, Canada
2016, Senior, Poetry & Spoken Word
Your grandmother’s blue couch
you take me south-to your mum’s cottage by the gulf-and teach me to swim underneath moonlit tides. kelp tangles point wayward between halfhearted backstrokes, looped across pinkies like tiny whispers of a hidden forever. hours crawl by in the summer heat but we don’t notice with ice pops running down t-shirts stained with sand, dripping lightheartedly onto your grandma’s antique couch. she yells at us afterwards because grape stains do not come off with detergent no matter how hard she scrubs. years pass and we cannot tell whether it is blue with black stains
or black with blue patches.
9:30am
channel 54.5-CNN- sunday morning news.
we see your mum’s beach on tv and
suddenly it isn’t a quick jest between lockers
anymore-it’s as real as the oil-painted
ducklings lying hopelessly on the very
sands we tread upon just a year ago.
may 12-louisiana.
the appearance of your home in unrelenting
white lettering beneath the smiling newsman
reminds us that how close it really is-the
seashells we found stare mercilessly at us from
the nightstand-illusions of black running through
their shattered exteriors.
2016.
it’s not years ago, not anymore, for the oil is
like our burning love for the whitewashed rocks
scattered across the cottage’s front door-infinite.
FINALE
You say it is summer
and the ice sheets have fallen
like rockslides, pirouetting under sunkissed tides
yearning for the gentle caress of time-worn pebbles
We walk to your cottage barefoot, parading across
amethystal clarity; feeling the kiss of minnows
between the cracks of sunburnt toes
Ducklings strut through-feathers painted black with
the very same crosshatched pattern on your grandmother’s
ancient couch stains-wrinkled collections of forgotten art
Perhaps we strung fish on starlight-stained hooks
but when the lines broke through the sparkling surface
the catch was faded black in the colour of midnight
Drunk on pinky promises of infinity within sunken
kelp tangles; only to realize the fragile blue of forever which
we tread so harshly upon had shattered
to a deathly black.
Reflection
Reflection
This collection is not intended to flow together like poetry because there is nothing beautiful about the destruction of our oceans. I wrote this as a tribute to a lost love - the pain and heartbreak of gluing back the pieces of what there once was only to find a hollow shell in its place. The pieces in this collection are choppy and seemingly unconnected, but it represents how we - how everything - changes as time goes on.
Like how our skies darken with smoke, our oceans are being stained with an irreversible black as well. With each oil spill we hear about on the news, the earth is one step closer to becoming a shadow - black and a mere fragment of what it could've been.