A Manifesto (Written) in Salt
By Noelia Ramón
Published 20 November 2025
Not proclamations, not carved marble promises,
not headlines, not smoke rehearsing its pose.
But the hand of wind rearranging clouds,
the alphabet of rain sketching itself away
on tin, on glass, on the shoulders of trees.
Not leaders, not maps, not the rust of their signatures.
Only shards of horizon stitched into dusk,
declaring parliaments the birds will ignore.
A manifesto written in salt,
vanishing each time the tide arrives.
To live is to inherit the grammar of shifting sand,
syllables folded in still shearwater wings,
sentences that begin with feathers
and end without punctuation
what law can hold the opaline shimmer,
what decree can anchor the moon’s insistence
on pulling the ocean closer,
on teaching every shoreline to yield?
The Earth has been patient.
And in listening,
it is not voices but currents:
the Earth thinking aloud in rivers,
the sky drafting its argument in storms.
Even the night revises itself
against the paper of our sleep.
Not verdicts, not borders, not iron crowns—
only the tide,
writing and erasing
writing and erasing
writing
Noelia's poem was selected from over 3,000 poems submitted during Poetry Month in August 2025, as part of our 30in30 Writing Competition.
Every day across Poetry Month, we publish a new writing prompt linked to our 30in30 Commissioned Poems for poets to respond to. Thanks to our generous partner, Dymocks Books, daily winners receive book prizes.
At the end of the month, we select three poets to develop their piece with us as a paid Red Room Poetry commission and receive a writer's pack from Dymocks.
Noelia's poem was written in response to Dženana Vucic's prompt:
Write a poem that is also your political manifesto.
'A Manifesto (Written) in Salt' is not a declaration but a surrender: an attempt to unlearn human authority and recognise the natural world as the true writer of all manifestos. I wrote it thinking of tides as editors, erasing and rewriting every claim we make. It is, in part, a response to the noise of political language—the smoke screens, the empty decrees, the laws that forget their origins in land and water.
The poem moves between opposites: the fragility of life and the Earth against the hardness of iron crowns and marble promises. It’s both an act of humility and resistance. An acknowledgment that the planet already speaks in its own language of wind, salt and water, and that our task as poets is to learn to read it again.
I submitted to 30in30 as a way to honour the discipline of daily writing, the small ritual of paying attention. For me, the challenge is not only about producing poems but about deepening presence, listening to the ordinary and letting language become a record of that noticing.
