(Featured at OaklandSeen website/blog for the 3-month BP spill anniversary on July 20, 2010, but not officially published:)

Litany for the Sea by Aimee Suzara

This is for the Vietnamese fishermen who wait in line for food stamps now that the fishing has stopped.  And for the Houma, for the Creole, the Croatian, Mexicano, for the white workers too, their nets slung loose like useless webs and their sails run slack. 

Some of you look like my people, brown faces chiseled in salt, seafarers, hard workers, family men. And now the Feds have come to check your papers, even as you work to turn the tides back. And with no masks or hazmat, you inhale toxins to the tune of threats and exploitation.  

This is for the children who would learn to study the sea and all of its swimming things, the lean of the hull or the taste of the wind.  The speckled trout on the line, the marlin’s sword gleaming as it flies, or the weight of a catch of shrimp. This is for the children of the fathers who cry to see their ocean dying.  

This is for Allen Kruse: in June you put a gun to your head aboard the Vessel of Opportunity.  You saw you future end as the sea became a graveyard.

This is for Saint Malo and Manila Village, where my people settled in 1763, yet no one ever hears this story.  Now there’s oil in the grass and leaking into Lake Pontchartrain. 

This is even for BP, making a show of short-term solutions. You’ve left 600 gutted sites abandoned in the Gulf. Will you look your shame in the face?

This is for the land, the land beneath the sea: you are bleeding, a wound gouged so deep. Each moment, each second, 2.5 million gallons per day.  And your blood has hardened in the form of tarballs washing up where children make sandcastles and carve their names with sticks.

This is for the sea. You carry the history of my people.  You carry more than books, more than what we translate by voice and siphon through our veins.  You know more than human memory. And we are killing you.

It must have been like this, upon arrival. Thick, heavy air that settles on the skin, unites with beads of sweat.  Water always joins itself.  The sun behind clouds emerges, the sky opens into blue, heat intensifies.  My hair becomes an animal, a pest I brush away.  It has grown full and reckless.

It must have been like this: like home, same sun of seven thousand islands, same sky and the same heavy, beading sweat.  So easy, then, to start a village on the bayou.  The same shrimp, only a different hue, maybe slightly bigger, or smaller.  The marsh buzzing and singing, familiar, like the jungle.  Thick like mud, like rainstorms, like pinakbet or lugaw.  It must have been like this.

This is for the sea.  I am a lost child, searching for a place to begin.  And into your arms, my people jumped from the colonizer’s ships.  You gave us passage, gave us chance.  Far away, you hold my seven thousand islands to your breast.   

There cannot be enough apologies. I can only pray there is a suture, a mending of your wounds. But I am not a surgeon, not even a nurse. And so I give you words, words to sorrow the blood back into your veins.