Coral Calls Out Anthropocentric Despair

Bleaching, the final loneliness—

zooxanthellae leeched

from our daggered harbors,

our colorless architecture

as vulnerable to your narratives

as your architecture

is to earthquake—

the earth doesn’t know

how to rest and you

don’t know how to gather

the broad hive of your

mind into glorious undoing.

So you photograph our cities

for posterity—the crabs and shrimp,

sponges and sea fans.

But none of us eat photographs.

None of us cosset memories.

Soon a full moon will urge

us to spawn and water will glow

with our small ornaments.

Beautiful, you say,

as your boats leave oil slicks, as above

in that ghastly place where no ocean

murmurs, your engines rev.

We know some of you weep; water speaks

of all its lives to us. But your grief

is that of a murderer

planting roses beside the victim’s grave.

Self is your first crime. Know

we were never yours—

to harm, to admire, to repair.