Ode to
Science 5
Ode to the Dying Oceans
‘The oceans are dying’
is proclaimed from car bumblers
and the front-page of National Geographic
but no one stops eating fish.
Maybe we could save the seas
if we could wake all up the dead Bison
under seas of waving Prairie grasses
and hear the ocean thunder in their run
----and we could trample down fences
all the way to the end of global warming.
Maybe we could stop the bleaching
of coral reefs
if we could stop global warming.
But wishes perish facing the shimmering
corpses of Bluefin Tuna,
corraled into drift nets,
slapped into cans on processing ships:
corporate flesh eaters ravage the sea’s buffalo,
kill off the many colored corals
just as they savaged the land with corn-fed
and voracious cattle,
leeched soils and spoiled streams
as the waves of cod were swarmed and hauled
drowning into the air of wet markets:
bloody concrete in Boston and Seattle.
Octopus, winter 2007
2.
O I wish I could understand water the way a whale does
I could stretch my imagination like sunshine
across the earth’s big belly and hear
the origin of life in the pregnant sea.
If the water of my eyes could finally see its origin
and look at the ocean though a tearless lens
I could swim with hammerhead sharks
and watch Cuddlefish light up like auroras.
I’d like to spread my thoughts out
in many directions
like an Octopus’s suckered arms
and change colors, all at once,
thinking new thoughts
like multicolored lights blushing in the deep.
If could be one of a long string
of white Whooping Cranes---
maybe I could fly home to the Gulf of Mexico again---
and I’d cross over Lake Erie and see
huge Sturgeons swimming towards Huron
before These Great Lakes fish were all killed off---
and if I was a grat white Whooper flying
I could see the unpolluted Mississippi
like a giant green snake, winding far below me,
and I would return to mate on an Island
in the Gulf of Mexico
before poison fertilizer created a 500 mile wide dead-zone
of oxygen starved
water
that kills most of the fish in that part of the Gulf.
The War on Nature cuts forests and rapes seas
and what can I say
to men who kill for wages or weekend pleasures,
shooting Coots and Cinnamon Teals,
or reel in a Swordfish for an office wall trophy.
How do you teach how to feel for what they kill
When they take pleasure
in watching fish die on a line?
We squander the liquid life of our natal nest
In a sea of waste and sorrow.
Sunflower sea star. Trinadad, Ca. 2005
3.
I watch a desperate crab crawl out of a large container
on a crab boat in Humboldt Bay.
There must be 500 crabs in it--
and a fishermen stuffs it back in
to be cracked open in a luxury restaurant.
For millions of years Sealions gather on beaches
sunning on sea-sprayed seastacks,
flying through the liquid kelp beds
lithe birds of the sonar deep.
Fisherman scapegoat Sealions to hide
their own guilt for overfishing the seas.
They illegally shoot them swimming behind the boat.
Fishermen scrape the mother-womb of the sea
with dragnets
scouring Sea Stars and Flounder
skewering sea turtles
hooking endangered Albatross on long lines.
Industrial catch after catch
battens black the hatch of the mysteries of the sea.
It is like killing your own mother, Pearl divers,
violence against Abalone, Herring,
cyanide prisons for endangered tropical fish,
We need to boycott pet stores, lobster sellers,
murderers of sharks and red rockfish.
Many species of shark are disappearing
While the Chinese eat fashionable Shark fin soup
and torture and murder other animals for the
phony cures promised by the Chinese Medicine market.
The sea
has been slaughtered of fish in West Africa
and the Cod are all dead in the Great Banks
and the Mediterranean are emptied of Tuna
while in restaurant people order fish
and the symbolic Jesus-fish on their car bumper will
not help the ocean when its empty of real fish
And dead seas begin to surround the continents.
Sea turtles seem crusty emeralds
dappled with ancient light
swimming over the sea sea grasses they eat
And many of them have cancer
from the pollution in the waters.
I pick up
a dead sting ray at the fish packaging plant in Eureka
And feel like evolution has become the liquid of my fingers.
I am less and less alien to the sea-liquid of my cells and eyes
But just as the sea has begun to remember itself in me
I realize how threatened the oceans really are.
eat no fish, because I know they are killing the seas.
I find myself saying over and over in my head:
Eat no fish: the oceans are dying
Eat no fish: the oceans are dying
I think it
is six or seven years now I have eaten no fish,
and the oceans are still dying.
May
07-july 09
