Ocean, every so often, a kitchen tile or child’s toy 
rises from you, years after the hurricane’s passed. 

This time, the disaster was somewhere else. 
The disaster was always somewhere else, until it wasn’t. 

Punctuation of the morning after: comma between red sky
and sailors’ warning; white space where a storm cloud lowers. 

Where the bay breaks away, the sentence ends: a waning
crescent of peninsula, barely visible 

but for the broken buildings, the ambulance lights. 
Ocean, even now, even shaken, you hold the memory 

of words, of worlds that failed slowly, then all at once. A
flotilla of gulls falls onto you, mourners draped in slate.

Copyright © 2022 by Liza Katz Duncan. Originally published in Poem-a-Day on April 30, 2022, by the Academy of American Poets.

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About the Treehouse Climate Action Poem Prize

“This vivid, lyrical description of the aftermath of a hurricane speaks directly to the many people on the front lines of the climate crisis. The poet’s careful images show us how the impossible has become mundane, and offer us necessary space to grieve.”
—Dr. Mustafa Santiago Ali & Alexis Pauline Gumbs

“This poem came out of the aftermath of Superstorm Sandy. Years later, objects lost in the storm continued to wash up on the beach. The ocean remembers, even after the news cycle has moved on.”
—Liza Katz Duncan