Hunger Weighs More Than Water

 a poem by Roger B. Rueda

The ocean is both their home and their hunger.
At dawn, they slip into its blue silence,
casting nets that know the weight of need,
dragging lines through water that
has given them more than the land ever has.
They know the tides by touch,
read the wind like scripture,
feel the nervous schooling of fish
before they even rise to the surface.
But of conservation, of policies and petitions,
of the fragile role the parrotfish plays
in the reef’s slow-breathing body—
they know nothing. How could they?
No one has ever told them,
and if they had, would it matter?
Would a lesson in sustainability
soften the ribs of a child gone too long without food?

Education, they say, is the answer.
Teach them, and they will care.
But tell me, has a lesson ever filled
an empty pot, ever soothed a fever
burning through a body left untreated,
ever built a boat strong enough
to carry a man past hunger?
They are told not to catch parrotfish,
told they are breaking the sea
each time they pull one from the deep.
But what is the sea to a man
who cannot afford to take his wife
to the doctor? What is a reef
to a woman whose last meal
was yesterday’s scraps?
To them, the parrotfish is not
a keystone species, not a guardian of coral,
not a small, bright link in a world
they have never been asked to understand—
it is only food.

It is easy to preach preservation
when your stomach is full,
easy to speak of shared responsibility
from the safety of land.
It is easy to call them reckless,
to say they do not care,
when you have never had to make
a choice between hunger and harm.
They are not reckless,
and they are not unthinking—
they are abandoned.
The government makes its promises,
draws its maps, drafts its laws,
but the sea remains the only constant,
the only place that has never
turned them away.

What loyalty can be expected
from those who have never
felt the weight of the nation’s hands
except to take?
What care can be demanded
from those to whom care
has never been given?
Before we tell them
what they must leave in the ocean,
perhaps we should ask
what we have left them
on the shore.