Chloe Chou
Chloe Chou is the 2022-23 Daly City Youth Poet Laureate and the 2022-23 South San Francisco Youth Poet-in-Residence. A South City resident, she is currently a freshman at Westmoor High School in Daly City. Her passions are coding and writing. In her free time, she likes to make mixtapes! In 2020, she published a book called The Phaeton Complex, which is available on Amazon and in the Peninsula Library System.
Ecopoem
EARTH
The screaming of birds
In the morning used to be
Songs. I wake up and the sunlight
Through the window is hazy,
There is news playing on the television
Downstairs as nations begin to fall into chaos.
As the planet heats up, so does the ocean.
As coral reefs absorb the carbon dioxide from the air,
— the air that we have polluted with our own greed, our own wrongdoings —
they are blanched white and the ocean begins to die.
Fish and other sea life are netted by the millions by fishers
With the passing of each minute, extinction unfolds globally.
Well, the sun begins to fall over the edge of the horizon,
you see. So we chase it. We chase it all the way to the edge
until the sun has fallen and the stars have fallen too.
When we sink into the ocean we will find nothing but
the bloated bodies of fish, when we try to find our way
through the land, we will find nothing but impossible drought and wildfires.
and earth begins to split at the seams.
Copyright © 2022 by Chloe Chou. Used with permission of the author.
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