2016 Bow Seat Ocean Awareness Student Contest fromthebowseat.org

High School Poetry Winner

Middle School Prose Winner

Death’s Parade

Elizabeth Chung

New York, New York

Bodies mesh together

Forming a sick conga line

That drifts through the water

Ribbons of black color

Trail after the celebrants

Of Death’s parade

A bird’s corpse

Dyed a slick black

Heads the marching band

Rows of lifeless fish

Mouths gaping open

Sing silent songs

An inert, barnacled turtle

Inked over with a dark rainbow

Makes up the occasional float

All the festivities are in place

Yet those who paid for the show

Do not come to watch

2016 Bow Seat Ocean Awareness Student Contest fromthebowseat.org

High School Poetry Winner

Middle School Prose Winner

Reflection

In today’s discussion of the tragedy that is water pollution, ocean litter takes

center stage. Indeed, it is certainly an epic disaster, and deserves all the attention it

gets, but what about all the other horrors that have occurred in the water? I believe

that events such as oil spills in the ocean, one of the most deadly forms of pollution out

there, need to be addressed as well. It’s a difficult, urgent subject, yet the average

person remains relatively blind to the causes and effects of such pollution. Just this year,

Shell spilled almost 90,000 gallons of oil into the Gulf of Mexico, and yet almost nobody

knows about it. I think that such ‘accidents’ such as these must be brought into the

public eye.

My goal when making this poem was to strike a chord within the reader that

resonated with a deep sense of wrong. We have indirectly caused this mess, this

sickness that is ‘death’s parade,’ and yet nobody bothers to pay any attention to it. I

can only hope that eventually, we will be able to live in a future where things such as oil

spills in the ocean are no longer occur.