Mercator Projection

Original composition by Jenaveve Gregory, an Anthropology Major at Cal Poly Pomona with a Minor in Nonviolence Studies. Crafted in response to Terisa Siagatonu's "Atlas", in Poetry (2018), The Poetry Foundation.

The Great Wave off Kanugawa, Katsushika Hokusai, created between 1830-32

The colonizer cannot conquer the sea

Though desperate he may try

Charting great ships across her waters

Moving stolen peoples to stolen land

Defiling her deep blue with murky oil

Dumping his trash into her womb

She lingers still, mighty and endless

Calm and lovely and furious

With righteous anger, she swallows up his properties

With tender care she feeds her shore born children

Passive to his claims over her borders

He cannot understand that her love has none

Futile in his attempts to corral her

Unable to drain her beauty and power

The colonizer fashions an atlas

And slices her in two

He places his nation, his prized game

Right in the middle

Like the skin of a bear 

Or the crown of a great buck

Hung over the mantel in the parlor

He colors neatly inside the lines

And plays pretend

That when he prints and sells his distorted, flattened map The ocean will belong to him as well

Purchased, pillaged, plucked

Not unlike the ground beneath him

How can the ocean

The giver of life

Submit to becoming the backyard of death

And how can the people of the land,

her children, her caretakers

Be diminished to a trophy hunt

Their presence lingers

It laps at the lawn of the deluded colonizer

While the vast ocean reflects the light of the people

Like a million shining stars

Singing a song so ancient

It encompasses the globe, sutures the wound,

and dissolves the borders of continents

Like ink on paper.

From Jenaveve Gregory's paper, On Reflection, Relativity and Reckoning: The Shortcomings of Our Democratic Experiment.