Background
I initially wrote this poem in hopes to possibly have it included in a book about climate relocation. It unfortunately wasn’t accepted, so I’m sharing it on here!
Before I get to the poem itself, let me tell you about the background of what inspired and led me to write the poem in the first place, for the story is a pretty interesting one. It all started about a month ago. I wss browsing YouTube and decided to watch a video from YouTube user DarkDocs titled “Is America’s Own Chernobyl Sitting In The Middle of the Ocean.”
In the video, he describes the history of the Runit Dome and the effects it could have on the environment today.
After the video was over, I watched in the suggestions tab titled “This Concrete Dome Holds A Leaking Toxic Timebomb | Foriegn Correspondent.”
It was a video by ABC News In-depth. In the video, it talks about the history of the Runit Dome and how it is affecting the Marshallese people presently. One of the people who was mentioned in the video was Kathy Jetnil-Kijiner, a poet from the Marshall Islands. In 2014, she had read a poem for her daughter in front of the UN for the Climate Summit. I thought her poem was very inspiring, so I wanted to follow her on social media to check out more of her work. I followed her on Facebook and Twitter. On her Twitter, I saw that she had shared an advertisement for a book that two climate scientists were working on getting published. The book would be a collection of works ranging from scientific articles to poems. I decided to submit a poem. I had sent a short excerpt of it to them. They said they liked it and that I should hear back a month later if my poem will be accepted or not. Fast forward to today, and I found out my poem was not accepted. However, they said they enjoyed the excerpt that I had sent to them, and that there were a lot of submissions to choose from. I wish the both of them good luck in getting the book published, and without further ado, here is the full poem that I had wrote!
The Poem
Bikini Atoll;
They were told
The US were protectors
Of hope
And of freedom.
Instead, they were relo-
-cated from their homes
While their atolls
Were bombarded with radiation,
Which had took a toll
On them and their souls,
And the remains of it all
Were buried underneath a dome
That is called “The Tomb.”
How ironic it’s name is, so,
Because the Runit Dome
Has the potential
To become their own tombs.
With sea level rising,
It’s becoming a crisis
That if the radiation finds its
Way out, it could
Completely poison
The entire Earth’s oceans,
And this is because of the
Changing Earth’s climate!
Is there any hope for us to survive this
Disastrous threat that could possibly annihilate us?
I’d say there is, but we need to realize this:
For us to survive it,
We all need to rise up and
Take a stand for what’s right, which
Is saving the entire planet
From total destruction.
It may sound bleak; it may sound alarmist,
But I believe we all can grow and thrive despite this!
That is why I, a mere man who writes this,
An artist with a creative mind that is
Concerned about the state of the world and this climactic climate crisis,
Had decided to sit down and take the time to write this.
I wrote this poem
Because I care about my home.
I care about the loved ones that I call my own.
I wrote this for my friends; my family, too!
I wrote this for their friends, and their families, too!
I wrote this for everyone; everyone that’s in the room;
The room that is so big and so round and so blue;
The room that has oceans that spans millions of miles;
The room that has a diversity of creatures both on land and in the sea;
The room that has been around for billions of years;
The room that houses a species that has accomplished many great feats, but has also caused a myriad of tragedies that led countless people to defeat;
The room that I’m proud to call planet Earth.
I was not asked to be born on this Earth,
But it is my place; the place of my birth.
It sorta just happened; one day I was conceived.
I grew to a fetus, then a baby, and then eventually an adult human being.
It was a slow process; just like humanity’s growth on this Earth for thousands of years.
We started out in caves, and eventually made great things.
Along the way, we also had created
Devastating weapons that can harm us and hurt us in many ways.
The same goes with climate change; it’s mostly man-made.
It is a mess that we ourselves had made.
The consequences are dire; the Earth is on fire.
But if we take a stand now, I believe we’ll survive this!
The Earth is our home; it is our dome.
It is the one thing that should come above all!
Just as the dome
Located in the Enewetak Atoll
Has the potential
To destroy us all,
We too have the potential;
The potential to be saviors
For not just the here and now,
But for future generations.
That is why I had wrote this poem.
So if you see this message, please heed the urgency
To do something about this climactic climate emergency
That could lead to insurgency
Of disastrous natural convergency
That could inadvertently lead
To extreme diathermancy
And create great divergency.
We must fight this looming threat, and we must do so with great fervency,
For it is this Earth that we love with great ardency!
We must stand up and fight, and must do so without errancy.
We must not treat this threat as a mere nonemergency.
We must respect this planet with great amounts of conservancy,
And clean up this world with great levels of detergency.
This our home; the home that we were grown.
This Earth is our dome, and this is its poem!
