Litany for the Sea

upon the BP Deep Horizon Spill in the Gulf, April 20, 2010

This is for the Vietnamese fishermen waiting in line for food stamps. For the Houma, the Creole, Croatian, Mexicano, nets slung loose like useless webs and sails run slack.

You look like my people, brown faces chiseled in salt, seafarers, family men. And now the Feds have come to check your papers, even as you turn the tides back. 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, the weight of a catch of shrimp. This is for the children of the fathers who cry to see their ocean dying.

For Allen Kruse who put a gun to his head as the sea became a graveyard.

For Saint Malo and Manila Village, where my people settled in 1763, yet no one ever hears this story. You brought Louisiana the dancing of the shrimp and hands made for harvest. Now there’s oil in the grass.

This is even for BP, making a show of short-term solutions. You’ve left 600 gutted sites abandoned in the Gulf.

This is for the sea, your wound so deep. Now your blood has hardened in the form of tarballs washing up where children make sandcastles and carve their names with sticks.

You carry the history of my people.

It must have been like this, upon arrival. Heavy air that settles on the skin, unites with beads of sweat. Water always joins itself.

It must have been like this: like home, our seven thousand islands. And so you built a village on the bayou. The same shrimp, the marsh buzzing and singing, like the jungle. Familiar - 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. Into your arms, my people jumped from the colonizer’s ships. You gave us passage. 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, only a poet.

And so I give you these words, words to sorrow the blood back into your veins.