Ecocentrism, Irony, and the Wounds of Nature in the Poem “Aku Ini”: Ecocriticism in the Context of North Maluku

The poem "Aku Ini" is from the anthology Karang Menghimpun Bayi Kerapu by Ibrahim Gibra. This poem conveys ecological irony: humans are praised for their clever symbolic "embroidering" of nature, yet they fail to sustain the environment. This study uses an ecocritical approach in a descriptive-qualitative design with textual close reading of diction, metaphors, stanza structures, and natural imagery. The main data, in the form of poetic texts, is contextual data that includes depictions of ecological degradation in North Maluku (deforestation, coastal pollution, plastic waste, mining pressure) as a background for the reading. The analysis maps the imagery of dew, sea, river, and socio-political realm (democracy) into Garrard's ecocritical theme clusters—pollution, pastoral, wilderness, animals or non-human agents, and the earth—to examine the construction of human-nature relations and traces of anthropocentric ideology. In the research, the findings show that there are three main elements, namely (1) the poem constructs a landscape of ecological wounds through the metaphor of a damaged natural body, (2) the repetitive irony of "cleverness" versus failure to act becomes a critique of ecological indifference and the decline of public ethics, and (3) the lyrical voice opens a shift towards eco-centric sensibility and a reflective call to ethical responsibility across creatures. In an eco-social functional way, this poem serves as a cultural warning and a pedagogical medium to foster ecological awareness in Indonesian literary studies, especially those rooted in environmental experiences in North Maluku.