Children of the Reef
I. Neptune’s Theater
A spinning sphere sheds heat
as a warm sea calcimines.
Turquoise Neptune in his tepid bath
drips epochs of lace from his fingertips
Sculpts a submerged garden of orange, pink, chlorophyll-green
where painted parrots chat up cardinals
butterfly and angel fry sway with wave-pulse
and foliate fingers beckon from arched windows.
Neptune’s children are curiously flat-bright
at night, jigsaw pieces meekly spine-locked in a labyrinth
beneath an array of bioluminescent stars
as a gangly pretender watches and blows bubbles.
II. Sapien Siege
The hot acidic hand of death grasps
and bleached spires implode
shattering the labyrinth
Reef’s children scream beneath planet’s stars
Butterflies impaled
Cyanide-swooning damsels
Mesh-tangled angels hauled heavenward
Spires to potash, corpses to coal.
The pretender to the throne blinks
rubs blurry lenses,
kicks plastic fins
and moves on to the next show.
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Ann says: All of the animal and human characters in this poem (except Neptune and The Pretender) are named after coral reef fish. Coral reefs, one of the most diverse ecosystems, are expected to be largely extinct within one human generation.
Copyright 2013 by Ann Marcaida.
Images:1. Andrey Narchuk 2. Neil Craver Photography
“One of the more interesting panels at the 2012 Aspen Environment Forum was a discussion of whether "nature" was even still a viable concept. It's broadly accepted that humankind has had such a profound impact on the Earth that there remains no part of the planet yet untouched, no part of our ecosystems that hasn't been altered by human activity. Even Antarctic lakes kilometers under glacial ice are subject to human fiddling. The question is, is this a permanent change? Can we do anything to reverse the Anthropocene?”
—Open the Future
True Nature: Revising Ideas On What is Pristine and Wild
e360.yale.eduA new book, Novel Ecosystems, edited by Richard Hobbs of the University of Western Australia and others, shows how many superficially natural ecosystems are heavily influenced by the introduction of alien species. Whether intentional or accidental, most introductions seem to have human origins.
This is disconcerting. “Over large parts of the globe, the ‘wilderness’ that people refer back to never existed,” says one of the book’s authors, Michael Perring, also of the University of Western Australia.
Nature has always had open borders for alien species on the move. Those itinerants may have been a driving force of evolution. But human activity has dramatically increased their travel options. We move many deliberately, as commercial crops or domesticated animals, for instance. Today, others can hitch a ride on ship hulls or in ballast tanks, aboard planes or on the wheels of trucks or the backs of domesticated animals. This phenomenon seems to have been going on for much longer than we sometimes imagine.
