Sara Fryd’s eye for detail and lovely self-expression is evident in her poem Joy Rising. Today she gives us a very different kind of poem, with very different emotion. This poem gives voice to sadness, grief, and, most strongly, anger. Sara speaks for many in this challenge to the official world order.
Tell Them
By Sara Fryd
Tell the mother dolphin your reasons
When your spewing oil drowns her baby
As she watches him die slowly, gasping for air
And she dies of a broken heart soon after watching her baby drown
Tell the pelicans when they are no longer able to fly or feed or lay their eggs
Tell the crab, the shrimp, the sharks, the fish, the birds
Tell the sand, the beach, the marshes, the platypus
Tell the incredible blue-green water of the Caribbean Sea
And the Gulf of Mexico
And when you’re done explaining again
Tell God …
Tell him that you have no plan at all, so you spend money
On advertising instead of cleaning up your spewing waste
Your ads make me sick
You can’t keep sucking greed out of the inside of the earth before it implodes
Why aren’t we standing on shore screaming at ourselves
Our way of life of purging and gorging, gorging and purging
Our destruction will not come
At the hands of our enemies
Who bring down the World Trade Center
Our destruction will come from our friends inside
Close friends, who speak English, whose actions are hollow greed
Still pissed they lost the Colonies in the American Revolution
Empty gestures of advertising, leaving empty nests near shore
Covered in oil
Go ahead Tony Hayward, don’t tell me that you’re a good guy
I already know that you’re a liar, that you’re no friend
Go ahead, tell Obama more of your lies, then tell God
Maybe he’ll listen; I’m deaf to your lies.
An amazing show of frustration. I think you would find many a person that would agree.