Aimee Nezhukumatathil's 'Sea Church'

Jennifer Hijazi directs PBS NewsHour readers to Aimee Nezhukumatathil's poem "Sea Church" for an extended meditation on the relationship between nature, poetry, and identity. Hijazi explains, "When a young Aimee Nezhukumatathil — a self-proclaimed 'little nerd' for nature and environmental literature — opened her books on science to the author page, she was discouraged by the lack of faces that resembled her own." From there: 

The daughter of a South Indian father and Filipina mother, Nezhukumatathil worried that she and brown girls like her didn’t belong outside. “Are we not supposed to be a part of this…excitement or wonderment about the outdoors?” she asked herself.

In her latest collection, “Oceanic,”, Nezhukumatathil adds her voice to the tradition of nature literature with a series of love poems for the Earth. Nezhukumatathil said she writes “around, through and towards” an image.

In her poem “Sea Church,” she reimagines dolphins as commas, every jump from the water of the Gulf Coast a punctuation mark in the air, encouraging pause and reflection. She imagines the “water-prayer” of her words rising like sky lanterns.

Teaching at the University of Mississippi, Nezhukumatathil said she’s witnessed first-hand the kind of power that equal opportunity for engagement in nature and science can have on students and youth. The more everyone is outside, she said, the better we treat the planet — and each other.

Read "Sea Church" at PBS NewsHour.