Home With The Diatoms
When I was a child
before sleep we prayed
for love to be shown, for safety to stay,
starved children in Korea to be saved.
Then the light would go off.
I'd put my real bed
of conches and nautilus twists
under the toss of the night's waves.
Regal on the seafloor
shells poked their bubbling heads
up out of snow-sand. Aquarelle fins and
gold-grey eye-globes blinked around me,
all greeted with a princess flip
of my green-scaled tail.
Reclined with coelacanths,
eyes blueing in my head,
all my mother-cut hair grown
long as a squid's arm,
I waited to swim into sleep,
watching the shadows of
far-above gulls mottle the green ceiling,
alone yet blanketed in
life watching over me, drowsing
to the epochs' stereopticon flash.
When we met in the deluge
you called in a lost language
for that nightspell to rise, to link us,
to sink us completely
in diatoms, wave after wave,
kissing underwater, not afraid to breathe
not afraid to drown, kelp-hair
in the undertow fanned and fluttered
summoned by a sea-fire of peace
to make ashes of fear.
March 2022
posted for earthweal's weekly challenge:
Process note: "..Diatoms are unicellular [microalgae]: they occur either
as solitary cells or in colonies, which can take the shape of ribbons, fans,
zigzags, or stars..Living diatoms make up a significant portion of the
Earth's biomass: they generate about 20 to 50 percent of the oxygen produced on
the planet each year, take in over 6.7
billion metric tons of silicon each year from the waters in which they live,
and constitute nearly half of the organic material found in the oceans..."~wikipedia
Images: The Bright Liquid, © Edmond Dulac Fair Use
Pink Shell With Sea Weed, 1937 © Georgia O'Keefe Fair Use
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