SENIOR CATEGORY TOPIC 4: The destruction of the Oceans is everyone’s concern
The Beginning
You are a witness to their destruction.
Hauled up in the fisherman’s catch,
a sea turtle breathes its curse,
with a straw, striped red, yellow, red,
plunged into his nostrils, halfway though.
It takes a forceps and a pair of gloves
to understand what your hands have done.
A gruesome mixture, plastic and blood,
and in your veins, the same criminal red.
It weeps, unfathomable drops of emotion,
or maybe that’s just the sea.
2. Dimming Horizon
You are a witness.
Carried by the eventual currents to shore,
the carcass of a fallen sea bird,
white feathers stained black, inks the sand.
In a macabre burial, lies the scapegoat.
A jet-black plumage, starved to the bone,
it’s enough to carve a monster.
But a beast was always birthed by another,
and not far from humanity, the leviathan rises.
Steel frames and tilting debris, a crude tanker
spills its contents, oil pooling outwards like night.
3. A Certain Darkness
You are a witness.
Roaming the deepest reaches of the oceans,
a pod of killer whales hunt for prey
like killer wolves stalking deer, projecting sounds,
rebounding waves that clear up the dark.
But the giant of ships lumber about,
drowning them in suffocating seas of noise,
blinding, overflowing their created expanse of light.
It tears them apart from their fading population.
Once majestic, a creature now, equally lost and blind,
the orca arches it back, and lets out a despairing howl.
4. Kingdoms To Crumble
You are a witness.
Seeping mercilessly through a thriving reef
of corals, a dust of smoke, cyanide, encompasses
every breath in its blind sight, an omen of death.
The city falls paralysed, a still-life painting
hung up in the halls, encased in glass.
Aquariums. Man’s regretless, remarkable, feat.
You marvel at fallen architecture, bleached homes,
but fail to see the violence, the silencing.
Someday, the poison could too find a path into your veins,
and then, you’ll realize: you had a life before they came.
5. The End Of This Black Book
I am the Ocean. And you are the witness to our destruction.
Nature plays a symphony for those who would listen.
Tell me, do you hear it? Do you hear our song?
Do you hear our heartbeat? Flailing like
a weakening pulse in the dark. Begging.
You sacrifice our very essence for lightning jars;
ink from Earth's vessels, paper from our trees,
skin of our living, the tusks of our beasts.
What more do you wish to take from us?
How much more of us to satisfy your greed?
Will it only be when the last drop has gone,
when the last tree topples, when the last cry echoes,
that you realize money cannot be eaten?
Through the passage of time, we were wronged.
But fear not, the oceans never knew peace
for we were made as one with the tides,
and we will crash like eventual waves
of reckoning upon the shore.
You will wish you had done something now.