The power of a poem
Amanda Gorman, who read her poem The Hill We Climb at Joe Biden’s inauguration, is a spokenword poet, a member of a large and vibrant international community of mainly young, activist performance poets. At a climate action conference in Auckland last year, Matilda Clack and Takunda Muzondiwa, students and former members of Mt Albert Grammar’s 4pm Poetry Collective, presented their own spoken-word poem. This is it.
The waves never made it
The waves never made it to the shore
Their sound never captured in conches or cochlears
The waves do not reach us anymore We distance climate dystopia from ourselves
Like the year 2050 isn’t within our lifetimes,
But these coping mechanisms may salve your cognitive dissonance But cannot create distance from the future, who remains fast approaching, like a tsunami.
We are burying dreams in graves Before they are planted in soil, Even in death mother earth
Will honour our memory Cremating our bodies by binding them to her soil
As if to say
She will hold us forever
All this trauma has aged us Coerced us into believing our time has already come Forgetting the future is our grandchild and we’ve been raising her all along
Dystopia has already arrived and what was once fiction is now fact; In my first year of university
I learned that the school mixes The recycling with the rubbish in the end anyway
And I guess that goes to show
That our individual efforts
To be our own sustainable saviours Are limited
By institutional and economic systems
When those in power put profit before people
They will fail to invest in our futures; So we ask them; if we too are made of water
What becomes of us when the oceans dry up?
Companies get money while conveniently avoiding accountability
Turn flashlight to families who can’t afford organic
And spotlight their struggle like a circus stage show
As if this is all entertainment
The applause of individual success almost sounds like an ocean crashing if you listen hard enough If we keep emphasising individual actions, we will never be able to view the world as whole
And when capitalism is founded on guilt, we’re all charged as guilty Sentenced to never being good enough or green enough
When instead we should be focused on being collective and not complacent
Now is the time to hold on to the optimism of a future that hasn’t yet faded
The collective desire for change sits in the very fact you remain in this room,
Listening to the breath that will exhale into tomorrow Stewardship across the skyline that stretches further than the eye can see;
Just because you can’t see it doesn’t mean the sky ends here —
This poem is the closest thing to hope we have
But we’re running out of metaphors, and running out of endings,
And so is mother earth.
If we’re the teenage protagonists in this dystopia,
Which role do you choose to play? Is your legacy one on paper or will it be written
In the actuality of a liveable planet Will your words be more than vessels for self-interested advantage,
And will they be heard in conches and cochlears, in the wind, in the rain The waves never made it to the shore
But maybe, there’s another ending where they do.